Zooplus Opens Its Marketplace: What It Means for Pet Brands
14 August 2026
by Alan Chester – Chief Customer Officer
Zooplus has launched a third-party marketplace in Germany, adding around 10,000 products to its assortment, with approximately 65% coming from pet accessories. The move follows its marketplace launch in France, where Zooplus says the model has already helped triple the number of products available to customers.
For pet brands, this is more than just another marketplace launch. It creates a new way to access one of Europe’s largest specialist pet audiences while retaining significantly more control over how products are sold.
Zooplus says it has more than 11 million active customers and operates across more than 30 European countries, making it an important ecommerce channel for pet food, accessories, health and care brands.
From wholesale to marketplace
Traditionally, Zooplus has operated primarily as a first-party retailer. Brands sell products wholesale to Zooplus, which then owns the stock and manages the retail relationship with the customer.
This is broadly comparable to a traditional vendor model: once the retailer purchases the stock, the brand has less direct control over areas such as assortment, retail pricing, promotional strategy and which products ultimately receive listings.
The marketplace introduces a very different model.
Third-party sellers list products through Zooplus, manage their own inventory and fulfil customer orders directly. This gives brands much greater ownership of their assortment and commercial strategy while still gaining access to Zooplus customers.
The opportunity for brands
Perhaps the most interesting opportunity is not replacing an existing wholesale relationship, but using marketplace alongside it.
Brands could continue supplying their highest-volume products directly to Zooplus while using marketplace to expand the range around them.
That could include:
- Premium or specialist ranges
- New product launches
- Bundles and multipacks
- Larger or alternative pack sizes
- Seasonal products
- Long-tail SKUs that Zooplus may not traditionally stock
- Products aimed at smaller or more specialist customer segments
This could allow brands to make a much broader portfolio available without needing every SKU to go through the traditional retailer buying and ranging process.
Marketplace could also become a useful testing ground. Brands could launch products directly, understand demand and build a sales history before discussing whether successful products should move into the core Zooplus retail assortment.
A broader shift for Zooplus
The bigger story is that Zooplus is starting to evolve from a traditional online retailer into a broader ecommerce platform.
Its existing wholesale business is unlikely to disappear. Instead, marketplace gives Zooplus a way to significantly increase assortment without owning every product it sells.
For brands, that creates a potentially valuable hybrid strategy: use traditional wholesale for scale, while using marketplace to expand assortment, launch products and take greater control of selected parts of the portfolio.