Zalando
EU’s Fashion Giant
Zalando IS Fashion
Any Fashion seller seeking a footprint in Germany and increasingly France and the wider EU needs to have Zalando in their sights. Annual sales are now at 5.4 billion euros, a true emerging EU giant in online fashion.
There are approximately 300,000 different fashion products from about 1900 brands at the time this is written (meaning there will be more as you read this!). They have a base over about 30 million active buyers.
On average, about 800 million customers visit Zalando every quarter. That’s a big market of Fashion-primed-buyers.
Categories are only supported for accessories, shoes, clothing, equipment, and sportswear.
But… signing up is…
Zalando takes its customer experience while shopping on the platform very seriously. It heavily restricts and controls the Brands it allows to sell on, and it heavily restricts the product permitted by the Brand.
But before you even get that far in the process, you need to be eligible. There application will demand from your company:
- You must have your own brand and ‘an online presence’, which basically means you need to have Brand recognition by their measure.
- You must be ready to offer free returns and delivery to customers on EVERYTHING, ALL the time…
- Your return policy must include a 100-day window for customers. No hassles or excuses.
- Your shipping must be with Hermes (UK), La Poste (FR) and DHL (DE). No exceptions.
‘Onboarding’ is… fun too.
We’ve onboarded many Brands over the years. This isn’t like any other channel you have launched on, trust us.
Zalando brings great sales numbers. They have a solid channel and methodology to picking product which sell on their channel. They are worth the application and set up, we want to be clear on that first.
But onboarding to their channel is grueling. No data set will be left untouched. No attribute, no matter how seemingly insignificant, will be left blank or ignored. Not one typo. Even images must be perfectly suited to the category spec, formatted with the right layout and dimensions…
We live and breath data. We live and breath marketplace management. We’ll tell you now – this channel is hard work. It’s worth it, but you’ll need to do the time.
Zalando and Germany – Sales and Returns!
Don’t ignore the unexpected. We do Zalando so you don’t have to.