The complete guide to selling your products on Europe's leading marketplace Zalando

Why sell on Zalando?

The answer to that question is pretty straightforward: as the most significant player in online fashion in Europe, Zalando offers valuable business opportunities for any fashion brand and retailer. Offering your products on a large marketplace like Zalando, you'll get access to millions of customers in different markets without doing any marketing of your own.

The online platform, which originated in Germany as an online shoe store, currently serves more than 46 million customers in over 23 European countries.

Consumers shop in a wide variety of fashion categories; besides shoes, Zalando offers men's and women's clothing, children's clothes, make-up, lingerie, luggage, and much more. In other words, if you're a fashion-based company, your products will fit into one of Zalando's broad categories.

But this is not the only reason Zalando is attractive to brands and retailers: Zalando handles the payment process and customer service for you.

Furthermore, external sellers can outsource their logistics process to Zalando with Zalando Fulfillment Services. You store your products in the Zalando warehouse, which will manage your products' stock management, packaging, and shipping. This allows a high service level that is difficult to replicate for smaller brands.

Another advantage is the low commissions Zalando charges their sellers and the absence of a sign-up fee. The selling fee consists of fixed monthly charges and a selling commission for every sold product. This commission is based on the product category and ranges between 5 and 25%.

How to sell on Zalando

If you offer your products on marketplaces already, you know that selling your products on a marketplace is often easier said than done.

It comes down to three things. You need to:

1. Be accepted as a seller
2. Be able to integrate with the marketplace technically
3. Make sure your product data matches the specific requirements of the platform

Channable helps you with the last two. But before integrating your shop with Zalando and optimizing your data, you need to register as a Zalando Partner.

How to become a Zalando Partner

Signing up as a Zalando Partner revolves primarily around proving that you can meet Zalando's standards. The registration process requires a lot of paperwork and technical requirements and can take weeks, so good preparation is vital.

Before thinking about selling your products on Zalando, you must:

1. Have an online store, as well as a (VAT-), registered business
2. Sell products in one of the following categories: clothing, shoes, sportswear, and equipment or accessories
3. Offer free shipping as well as return and be able to provide all related documents; a logistics partner approved by Zalando must do the shipping
4. Be able to guarantee a 100-day return policy

If you fulfill these requirements, you can start the registration process for the Zalando Partner Program.

Zalando knows two fulfillment options:

• 'Regular' Zalando partners, who do their fulfillment themselves
• Partners, who use the Zalando Fulfillment Service and send their stock in bulk to Zalando, which then manages the complete fulfillment logistics

Currently, Channable does not offer an integration with Zalando Fulfillment Services yet, but we're working on an implementation as you're reading this. And for the time being, you can easily keep track of all your orders and stock management thanks to our order connection.

The Registration as Zalando Partner involves two phases:

First, you apply for the Zalando Partner Program and prepare your documents, including your KYC (Know Your Customer). The KYC identifies the contractual parties and is a legal requirement based on the German Money Laundering Act.

After Zalando approves you as a partner, you'll get access to zDirect, the self-service retail operations tool from Zalando. In phase two, you need to complete the Partner Readiness Checklist in zDirect.

You'll find more information about the registration process at Zalando on the Zalando Partner Portal and in our Help Center.

Technical integration with Channable

After Zalando approves you as a Zalando partner, we can start with the integration of your webshop into Zalando. Channable works as an integrator, meaning that you upload your product data to Channable, and we then push it to Zalando. This way, we ensure that your product data meets Zalando's requirements and is always up to date.

Before starting the integration, we'd like you to fill in this form, even though you've probably had enough paperwork by now. We're asking you this to clarify all necessary information right away so that we can help you optimally from this point on. After filling in the form, you need to invite Channable as an External Technical Organization using zDirect. Once you've succeeded in this, we will start setting up the Zalando connection. Our support team will create the API connection and the order connection.

For Zalando, you need to use the order connection, as your zDirect environment does not support the handling of orders. With the Channable order connection, all your Zalando orders are sent directly to your online shop, meaning that all your marketplace orders are fully synchronized at any time, saving you valuable time that you can spend on counting your revenue.

You'll find a more detailed guide on setting up the Zalando API with Channable in our Help Center.

Optimize your data for Zalando

Zalando operates a marketplace business model, meaning that you as a retailer are responsible for selecting the articles and the prices. With Channable, it’s easy to filter the products you want to offer on Zalando. For example, Zalando only allows products from the latest collection; with our powerful rules, you automatically filter all older items so that they never even reach the platform.

Once you've selected your products, you need to upload your product data to the online Zalando catalog.

To make sure your products are accepted, you need to match the Zalando content and image guidelines:

• All products are required to have an EAN-13 and must be correctly labeled

• Make sure your product images fulfil the specific Zalando policies (e.g. specific color range for the background)

• The products need to be categorized and feature the particular attributes for the given category.

In our Help Centre you’ll find a more in-depth, step-by-step plan to prepare your product data for Zalando.

Go live and sell!

Before going live, you’ll be fulfilling a test order, to make sure, everything works all right - your first order of hopefully many to follow!

Selling your products on Zalando might seem like a bit of a headache. However, our Channable API connection with Zalando will make the integration as easy as possible.

In addition, our technical support will assist you every step of the way and make sure your products are ready to sell on Zalando asap!

Are you ready to start selling on Europe's leading marketplace Zalando?

If you’re a Channable user, reach out to our technical support to help you with the first steps. If you are new to selling on marketplaces, discover Channable with a free trial.