Go-to-market strategy for the Czech Republic and Slovakia: a 2026 expansion playbook

Rule one: two markets, not one

Czechs and Slovaks understand each other's languages almost perfectly. That single fact seduces more foreign companies into failure than any other, because it whispers that one plan will do. It will not. The currencies are different: Czechia uses the koruna (CZK), Slovakia uses the euro. The VAT is different: 21 percent in Czechia, 23 percent in Slovakia since January 2025. The buying habits are different, the comparison engines are different, and Slovaks notice immediately when a brand treats them as a Czech afterthought.

Run them as two localized plans that share back-office, brand and strategy, but split positioning, pricing, payments, logistics and channel weighting by country. Regional backbone, local face. Get this wrong and everything downstream inherits the error.

The numbers that should shape your plan

Strategy without sizing is a wish. Here is the shape of the two markets going into 2026, which should decide how much you invest where.

Read the table like an operator. Czechia is the larger, deeper, more mature market and usually the beachhead. Slovakia is smaller but reachable on the same logistics and often the same team, so it is the natural second step rather than a separate project. The euro also makes Slovakia a cleaner bridge to eurozone pricing.

The economic backdrop, and why the timing is good

Do not read these as poor Eastern European markets to be sold cheap stock. Czechia is one of the wealthiest and most industrialized economies in Central Europe, with GDP per capita in purchasing-power terms close to the EU average and climbing, and Prague ranks among the richest regions in the entire European Union by purchasing power. Unemployment sits among the lowest in the EU, which in plain terms means a confident, employed consumer with money to spend.

Growth is a recovery story. After the 2022 to 2023 inflation shock hammered real wages, both economies returned to modest growth, wages are rising again in nominal and increasingly real terms, and household consumption is coming back. Slovakia, a euro member and one of the world's largest car producers per head, walks the same convergence path a step behind. For a foreign brand this matters twice over: purchasing power is real and growing, and consumers have quietly become as demanding as anyone in Western Europe. You are not entering a discount market. You are entering a mature one that expects Western standards at a sharp price.

How the research is actually done

Most entry decks are desk research dressed up as insight. Real market entry research triangulates three layers.

Desk and demand data. Start with category demand, not opinions. Pull search demand from both Google and Seznam (Sklik), read Heureka category data to see what actually sells and at what price, and map the top players and their pricing. This tells you the size of the prize before you spend a koruna.

Competitive teardown. Buy from the top three local competitors yourself. Mystery-shop the whole journey: checkout options, delivery choices, packaging, the follow-up e-mails, the returns flow. You learn more from three real orders than from any report, and you find the local table stakes nobody wrote down.

Primary voice. Talk to real buyers and, for B2B, to real decision makers. Ten honest interviews will surface the objections, the trust triggers and the language people actually use. Then size it properly: local TAM, the slice you can realistically serve (SAM) and the share you can win in year one (SOM), per country, not blended.

Consumer behaviour: the part foreigners underestimate

This is where deals are won or quietly lost. Czech and Slovak shoppers are experienced, sceptical and spoiled by excellent local logistics. They will compare you, read your reviews and abandon you at checkout if you feel foreign.

Price comparison is the real storefront

In Czechia the customer journey rarely starts on your website. It starts on Heureka, the dominant price-comparison engine (Slovakia has Heureka.sk and Pricemania). Around 72 percent of Czech e-shops list on aggregators. If you are not there, priced well and reviewed, for a huge share of shoppers you simply do not exist. Budget for aggregator feeds and margins from day one, not as an afterthought.

Reviews are currency, not vanity

Heureka's Verified by Customers (Ověřeno zákazníky) badge is close to a licence to trade. 77 percent of Czech shoppers say reviews influence their choice, 50 percent say they buy only from e-shops that carry the certificate, and 42 percent look for a healthy number of positive ratings. A new foreign brand starts with zero reviews, which reads as risk. Engineer review collection into your post-purchase flow from the first order, or you will bleed conversions to incumbents who have thousands.

Payments: cash on delivery is not dead in Czechia

Western entrants love to skip cash on delivery. In Czechia that is a self-inflicted wound: a large share of shoppers still pay on delivery, alongside strong bank transfer and rising card use. In Slovakia the balance tips the other way, cards lead at roughly 40 percent, so cash on delivery matters less. Offer local gateways (GoPay, ComGate and similar), Apple Pay and Google Pay, instant bank buttons, and buy-now-pay-later options like Twisto in Czechia. Every missing familiar payment button is a reason to leave.

Delivery: pickup points and lockers, not just couriers

The region runs on parcel pickup. Zasilkovna (Packeta) is the default many shoppers expect, with a dense network of pickup points and lockers, alongside Balikovna, PPL, DPD, Alza boxes and others. Shoppers choose the pickup point at checkout the way Westerners choose a delivery date. If you only offer home courier delivery, you feel foreign and expensive. Offer pickup points and a sensible free-shipping threshold, and show delivery price and options before checkout, not after.

Mobile and marketplaces

Slovakia already does the majority of web sales on smartphones, and Czechia is close behind, so mobile is the primary design target, not a scaled-down desktop. Marketplaces matter too: Alza is a giant in Czechia, Allegro has entered the region, and Heureka runs its own marketplace. Decide deliberately whether marketplaces are a channel, a competitor or both.

Do not ignore Seznam in Czechia

Google leads Czech search with around 80 percent, but Seznam still holds roughly 12 percent and, more importantly, owns an ecosystem: the Sklik ad network, the Zbozi.cz comparison engine, Firmy.cz and Mapy.cz. Older, higher-trust and often higher-converting audiences live there. Run Seznam alongside Google in Czechia. In Slovakia, Google is effectively the whole game.

Culture, humour and how to actually talk to Czechs and Slovaks

This is the part no dashboard shows you, and the part that quietly decides whether your copy lands or dies. Czechs are, by reputation and in daily practice, among the most sceptical, ironic and pathos-allergic consumers in Europe. The national literary hero is the Good Soldier Svejk, a man who defeats absurd authority by cheerfully pretending to obey it. When the country ran a poll for the Greatest Czech, a fictional genius named Jara Cimrman, invented purely as a national in-joke, had to be disqualified because he was winning. That tells you everything: this is a culture that trusts self-irony and distrusts anyone who takes themselves too seriously.

The marketing consequences are concrete and expensive to ignore. American-style hype is poison here. Words like best, amazing, revolutionary and number one trigger suspicion rather than desire, because superlatives read as either lying or naive. What works is dry wit, understatement, honesty about the downside, and proof instead of adjectives. A brand that says "this is not for everyone, and here is exactly who it is for" earns more trust than one promising to change your life. Humour is welcome, but it has to be smart and a little self-deprecating, never cheesy. Get the tone wrong and a sceptical Czech simply closes the tab, politely and forever.

Two practical, revenue-moving specifics. First, this is a discount-literate culture: the words akce and sleva (sale and discount) do real work, price transparency matters, and Black Friday is now a fixed season on the calendar. Second, localize the holidays, not just the language. At Christmas the gift-bringer is Jezisek, the baby Jesus, not Santa Claus, and a campaign that drops an American Santa onto a Czech audience instantly reads as foreign and lazy. Slovaks are a shade warmer and less openly cynical than Czechs, but the same rule holds: earn it, do not claim it.

Prague is not Czechia: how behaviour shifts by region

Foreign teams tend to test in Prague, see promising numbers and assume the whole country behaves like its capital. It does not. Prague is a wealthy, cosmopolitan, service-driven city with the highest wages and prices in the country, a large expat and English-speaking population, early adoption of digital payments and shoppers who behave much like their Western European peers. Use Prague as your baseline for the entire market and you will misprice everything and misjudge demand.

Brno, the second city and the capital of Moravia, is younger, cheaper and quietly a serious technology hub, home to major universities and a dense cluster of IT, cybersecurity and software firms. It skews student, tech-literate and value-conscious, with a relaxed Moravian identity and a preference for wine where Prague reaches for beer. Ostrava, the third city in the industrial Moravian-Silesian northeast, carries a proud working-class, heavy-industry heritage that it is busy reinventing around culture and services. Expect more price sensitivity, more pragmatism, a strong regional identity and a distinctive dialect, and reward authenticity over polish.

Beyond the three big cities, the regional towns and the countryside shift further in the same direction: more price sensitivity, heavier use of cash on delivery, more reliance on Seznam and traditional media, older demographics and a stronger response to trust signals and familiar local names. The rule of thumb is simple: the further from Prague, the more value, proof and familiarity beat novelty and premium positioning. Plan media, pricing and tone by region, not by a single national average that secretly just means Prague.

Legal, tax and operational setup

Boring, and the thing that quietly kills launches. The essentials:

• VAT and OSS. For cross-border B2C you can sell under the EU One Stop Shop scheme and charge destination-country VAT above the 10,000 euro EU distance-selling threshold. Above real volume, a local VAT registration or a local company usually makes sense.
• Local entity. A Czech or Slovak s.r.o. (the local limited company) is not mandatory for cross-border selling, but it buys trust, easier local payments and logistics, and it is often required for serious B2B and public-sector deals.
• Consumer law. EU rules apply: a 14-day right of withdrawal, statutory warranty, clear pricing and terms. Returns must be genuinely easy, or reviews will punish you.
• GDPR and consent. Cookie consent and data handling are enforced. Your consent banner is a legal instrument, not decoration.
• Local trust signals. A local company number (ICO), VAT number (DIC), a local phone line and an address read as legitimacy. Absence reads as a drop-shipping scam.

Localization done properly

Translation is not localization. Because Czech and Slovak are so close, lazy brands ship one language and hope. Do not. Localize both, run separate .cz and .sk storefronts, price in the local currency with local price psychology (a straight currency conversion looks foreign and often lands on ugly numbers), and use native copy, not machine translation that native speakers spot in one sentence. Local customer support in the local language, during local hours, is part of the product, not a cost centre.

Channel mix and the go-to-market motion

For B2C e-commerce the spine is clear: aggregators (Heureka, Zbozi), performance on Google and Seznam, a hard-working post-purchase and review engine, retargeting, and pickup-point-friendly logistics. For B2B, trust and relationships carry more weight than paid reach, so lean on local references, partnerships and a named salesperson people can meet.

Whatever the motion, resist the urge to light up ten channels at once. The most common failure of well-funded entrants is spreading thin across everything in month one. Pick one wedge, one country, one channel that can prove repeatable economics, win it, then expand. Partnerships accelerate all of this: a local agency, a fulfilment partner and a media house shortcut months of learning.

What to avoid: the entrant's hall of shame

• Treating Czechia and Slovakia as one market with one plan.
• Skipping cash on delivery in Czechia, or skipping pickup points anywhere.
• Launching without Heureka presence and a review-collection engine.
• Ignoring Seznam and its Sklik and Zbozi ecosystem in Czechia.
• Machine translation and straight currency conversion instead of real localization and local price psychology.
• Home-market playbook copy-pasted, including tone that reads as pushy or naive to a sceptical local buyer.
• No local support, no easy returns, no local trust signals (ICO, DIC, address, phone).
• Spreading the launch budget across every channel instead of proving one wedge first.

A phased roadmap

Days 0 to 90: pick the beachhead (usually Czechia), finalize local ICP and pricing, stand up localized storefront and payments, connect Heureka and start collecting reviews, launch one focused acquisition channel, and instrument measurement.

Months 3 to 6: optimize the funnel against real local data, add the second payment and delivery options that the data demands, expand channels only once the first one shows repeatable economics, and prepare the Slovak localization.

Months 6 to 12: open Slovakia on the proven engine, decide on a local entity if volume justifies it, deepen partnerships, and layer brand building on top of the performance base so acquisition costs stop rising.

Mini glossary of local terms

• Heureka: the dominant Czech and Slovak price-comparison engine and review platform.
• Overeno zakazniky: Heureka's Verified by Customers trust certificate.
• Dobirka: cash on delivery, still a major payment method in Czechia.
• Zasilkovna / Packeta: the default pickup-point and parcel-locker network.
• Vydejni misto: a pickup point where customers collect parcels.
• Seznam, Sklik, Zbozi.cz: the Czech search engine, its ad network and its comparison engine.
• s.r.o.: the Czech and Slovak private limited company.
• ICO / DIC: the local company registration number and VAT number.
• OSS: the EU One Stop Shop VAT scheme for cross-border B2C.

Frequently asked

Sources: ECDB and Statista (Czech and Slovak e-commerce size, payments) · BizMachine and Erste Group (online adoption, e-shop density, aggregator usage) · Statista and StatCounter (Seznam versus Google share) · Heureka Group (Verified by Customers data) · Taxually and PwC (Slovak VAT 23 percent since 2025, EU OSS) · Médiář and ROI digital (local commerce practice). Figures are directional and rounded; validate against the latest reports before you commit budget.

Planning an entry into Czechia or Slovakia and want a plan built by people who have actually done it here? Talk to us, the first opinion is free, even if it is "not yet".