Zalando – A guide to selling in this space
7 August 2026
Karanveer Shergill – Advertising Associate Director
Ask brands how they sell on Zalando and you’ll get different answers. Is it a marketplace or does Zalando buy your stock outright? Is ZFS a way of selling or just a way of shipping? Where does advertising even fit in?
There are three models with people only knowing one
- Wholesale: Zalando buys your stock and sells it themselves
- Partner Program: you list your own catalogue, set your own prices, own the customer relationship
- Connected Retail: your physical store stock gets synced live to Zalando so your shops effectively become online mini-warehouses.
ZFS isn’t a fourth option but everyone treats it like one anyway
ZFS gets talked about like it sits next to Partner Program and Connected Retail as its own model. It doesn’t, it’s a fulfilment choice inside a Partner Program.
Once you’re in, you pick:
- ZFS (Zalando Fulfilment Solutions): ship stock into Zalando’s warehouses, they pick, pack, ship.
- Self-fulfilment: ship from your own warehouse via an approved carrier
What onboarding actually requires (the stuff that isn’t in the sign-up email)
- Integration method: preferred integrator, or zDirect direct but zDirect’s only open to ZFS partners.
- Image and content guidelines: approved before your catalogue goes live, not after.
- Platform Rules: the binding rulebook, delivery documentation, packaging, returns experience, all of it.
- EPR registration: mandatory in France, Germany, Austria, and Spain.
- KYC documentation: required under German anti-money laundering law, submitted post contract.
- EU legal representation and customs: mandatory no matter which fulfilment route you pick, plus an EU based return address in every case.
- VAT IDs: for the countries that you ship stock to
Advertising: ZMS is playing a different game to Amazon Ads
Zalando Marketing Services (ZMS) is the marketing layer on top of all of this:
- Ad Manager (self serve): self-serve Sponsored Products and Sponsored Collections (broader awareness media). Only went self-serve at the end of 2021 and before that it was fully managed with minimum budgets that priced smaller brands out.
- Managed service: display, homepage takeovers, social extensions, influencer that is still largely run with Zalando’s own team, not self-serve but we expect more to come to self sere
If you’re coming at this from Amazon Ads, don’t expect the same. API access is limited to managed partners, and self-serve is still in its child phase as it only has sponsored ads and sponsored collections but we believe more and more formats will be accessible in which Luzern have the experience in managing
Some of our takeaways
- The confusion is the opportunity: brands lose weeks to the Wholesale/Partner/Connected Retail mix-up and the “ZFS is a model” myth. Getting this right first time is most of the battle.
- Sequence compliance before you plan media: EPR and KYC aren’t admin — they’re launch-date risk if left late.
- Use ZMS for brand, not for bidding: right now it’s a better fit for storytelling than for the kind of performance optimisation you’d run on Amazon.
This is exactly the kind of thing we help brands work through at Luzern, where the commercial model, the fulfilment choice, the compliance sequencing, and the media plan all have to line up, not get solved one at a time.