The 10 largest e-commerce acquisitions in the world. Among them Allegro

The sale of the Allegro auction site is the largest transaction of an Internet service in Poland, and one of the largest of its kind in the world over the past year.

Allegro Group has been bought by London-based private equity funds Cinven, Permira and Mid Europa Partners. The existing owner, South Africa's Naspers, got the sum of $3.25 billion for the deal. - This is a good price for the Polish e-commerce leader. The Polish online shopping market is growing all the time thanks to new e-shops - Polish and foreign. Poles can already buy on popular Asian sites, on Amazon.de, and Facebook's Marketplace is on the horizon. Allegro's new owners therefore face the challenge of maintaining their current position and holding 40 percent of the market, according to Tomasz Tybon, director of marketing and sales at Dreamcommerce, provider of Shoper store software.

In terms of value, the Allegro sale deal is unrivaled in the Polish e-commerce industry. Moreover, it ranks among the top acquisitions and ownership changes that have been announced in the global market over the past year.

In December 2015, payment services technology conglomerate Global Payments announced its intention to acquire Heartland Payment Systems. The latter provides cashless payment processing services via credit, debit and prepaid cards and checks. The deal is worth $4.3 billion. China's e-commerce giant Alibaba paid $300 million less for a 100 percent stake in Youku Tudou, a video streaming service. The deal was finalized in April 2016. - Previously, Alibaba held a 16.7 percent stake in the service, described as China's YouTube.

$3.3 billion is what the supermarket chain Walmart paid for the Jet.com startup, an online sales platform even described as an alternative to Amazon.com. It's the largest deal in U.S. e-commerce to date. A few weeks earlier, Salesforce, provider of the SalesCloud sales support platform, announced the purchase of Demandware, a developer of cloud-based e-commerce software. The value of the deal - $2.8 billion.

Another deal in the payment services technology sector is Total System Services Inc.'s acquisition of TransFirst. TSYS paid $2.35 billion to TransFirst's previous owner, Vista Equity Partners, and the deal was finalized in April this year. Meanwhile, Vista Equity Partners had already spent $1.79 billion in May to buy Marketo, a marketing automation software developer.

The aforementioned Naspers late last year took a majority stake in Russian e-commerce site Avito.ru. The price the conglomerate paid to increase its stake from 17.4 to 67.9 percent was $1.2 billion.

The investment by Unilever, which trades in personal care, hygiene and food products, in Dollar Shave Club made headlines in July. It cost Unilever $1 billion in cash to buy the startup, which sells razors in a subscription model. The same amount was paid by the Alibaba conglomerate for a majority stake in Lazada.com, an online store operating in the South Asian market. The deal is the Chinese giant's largest overseas investment.

- The presence of a Polish service in the top 10 acquisitions in global e-commerce confirms the value of the domestic online shopping market. Poland is still a thriving player in this field. Over the past three years, the number of stores set up on the Shoper platform has tripled. Allegro itself has promoted online sales among Poles, who are eager to open an additional sales channel in the form of their own e-shop, according to Tomasz Tybon of Dreamcommerce.