GDANSK (Reuters) - Shares in Polish e-commerce software provider Shoper jumped as much as 22% on their stock market debut in Warsaw on Friday, riding the wave of an online shopping boom amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Poland’s e-commerce sector has seen rapid growth in recent years, further fuelled by COVID-19 restrictions, with companies such as sales platform Allegro, parcel locker operator InPost and online fashion retailer Answear.com going public since last autumn. Shoper, which says it has around 45% of the market for providing software as a service (SaaS) for e-commerce in Poland by customer count, aims to more than double its customer base to 50,000 stores by 2026. “Shoper is an attractive, quickly growing company with exposure to the e-commerce sector growth. (...) The offer was fully booked at the maximum price, suggesting high demand from the institutional side and that not all funds managed to buy as many shares as they wanted,” said Pekao brokerage analyst Lukasz Kosiarski. “Additionally, between completing the bookbuilding process and the debut, the market began to increasingly discount the risk of another pandemic-related lockdown, which would boost e-commerce, including Shoper,” he added. Noble Securities analyst Maciej Kietliński noted the company’s strong first quarter performance, with revenues increasing by 71% year-on-year to 15.8 million zlotys ($4.1 million) and its bottom line nearly doubling to 4.5 million zlotys, an increase of 92% versus 2020. “I hope you will be an outstanding company in the long term on our market and that you will join the main Warsaw Stock Exchange indexes shortly,” said the bourse’s chief operating officer, Piotr Borowski, at Shoper’s debut. At 0945 GMT, Shoper’s shares were up 14.5% at 53.80 zlotys per share, compared with their offer price of 47 zlotys. They earlier traded as high as 57.53 zlotys. ($1 = 3.8356 zlotys) Reporting by Karol Badohal; Editing by David Goodman and Mark Potter Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.