If you are a fashion retailer, you may have considered selling your products on the Zalando marketplace to drive (extra) sales. The sustained, solid, and extraordinary growth of the German company Zalando has made it the leading operator in the fashion industry in Europe.
Give your business a boost by learning how to sell on Zalando. It’s simple and has a lot of potential to open a new sales channel for your fashion brand. Today we explain to you how to do it.
Having a fashion brand is a heavy and difficult task currently. It takes a lot of work to expand your brand and name. That is why it is important to find different and well-known sales channels. In the case of Zalando, you can increase notoriety of your fashion brand and be exposed to thousands of customers and visitors.
In this article, we want to explain to you how to sell on Zalando. The truth is that there is not much information about this topic available online yet, mainly due to Zalando being new as a marketplace channel. We’re going to change this, by writing this article especially for you!
What is Zalando?
Fashion enthusiasts recognize Zalando as a platform where they can find the latest trends in clothing, footwear and accessories, regardless of any gender and age. This marketplace, which supplies a wide variety of products from multiple fashion brands in many European countries, was initially born to limit frictions between consumers and online shoe stores.
Did you know that returns are very high in retail? Reaching an average of 24% compared to the sales? Although all online retailers have experience with returns, it is common the average percentages for fashion stores are higher. The Zalando team already knew when they started their journey. “Do you buy shoes on the internet without trying them on?” can be read in his biography. “That will never work!”
Innovation and the rapid adoption of e-commerce have been critical to the success of Zalando. Similar to other big e-commerce players such as Amazon, Zalando focused on customer satisfaction from the beginning. Once again, we are dealing with a company that does not joke around with the “customer comes first, second and third” slogan. For Zalando, it is also the fourth and the fifth!
How to sell on Zalando?
It’s time to explain to you how to sell on Zalando. Since the Zalando WooCommerce plugin by Woosa was launched, it is easy to connect your online WooCommerce store to the Zalando marketplace.
Selling on Zalando is a natural way to market the products of your clothing or shoes brand. Plus, it’s free for the first three months. Through its zDirect system, you can publish your own fashion brands products.
After applying, any approved brand can use Zalando its platform, similar to the WordPress CMS. Zalando is a way to easily reach thousands of visitors and potential buyers, without upfront marketing costs. Therefore any fashion brand can easily scale.
Zalando’s objective is to serve as a digital shopping centre and push thousands of European fashion companies to have daily orders from the Internet.
We explain to you why you should sell on Zalando, when you have an online store, what steps you need to take to be part of the Zalando marketplace, integrate your online WooCommerce store and how Woosa will help you achieve it.
Why sell on Zalando?
If you have an online fashion brand, you have a good opportunity to increase sales when you work with the Zalando marketplace. So many retailers are already Zalando Partners; why?
1. Because of the low commissions
There is no setup fee; the sales fee is a monthly subscription, plus a 5-25% commission on each product sold. This amount depends on the product category.
2. Because of its scope
The marketplace has more than 50 million customers, millions of visits to its website and an online presence in 17 European countries. Among the countries are Germany, Finland, France, Austria, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Luxembourg, England, Switzerland and Spain. Imagine reaching millions of potential customers without having to do marketing and promotion on your own. Your online store maintains the essence of your brand, and as a Zalando Partner, you can go beyond the limits of being a small retailer.
3. Because of the management facilities
Zalando takes care of the payment process and customer service.
You can even outsource the logistics and let Zalando do the shipping if you join the Zalando Fulfillment Services (ZFS) program and store your products in their warehouses.
In this way, Zalando Partners benefit from an efficient stock management, packaging and shipping system, offering your customers a quality standard that is difficult to beat.
Let’s see some other Advantages of Selling on Zalando:
- Solve your digital problems. Your site where you can sell without spending on marketing or the web.
- Security of payments. Zalando secures payments without you having to worry about it.
- Controlled platform. Zalando controls and maintains the web platform daily.
- Stock control. You can choose how much you want to sell to not overload yourself.
- Free returns. Zalando does not charge a commission on those products that are returned.
Commissions for selling on Zalando vary depending on the product sold. In addition they charge a monthly fee for selling on Zalando except for the first 3 months.
Steps to start selling on Zalando
Learning how to sell on Zalando is very simple; you have to follow these steps:
1.Become a Zalando Partner
Zalando imposes some requirements to approve their partners. First of all you need to obviously sell fashion items and you need to be able to offer free shipping and returns up to 100-days.
There are two forms of collaboration. You can be part of the basic Partner Program, where Zalando takes care of payments and customer support. Or you can go further and enter the Zalando Fulfillment Service and have them take care of stock storage, order management, shipments and returns.
However, the Zalando zDirect marketplace has clear guidelines for accepting new retailers, so take a good look at how to register on the platform and its requirements.
1.1 Eligibility
To start the onboarding on Zalando zDirect, you need to go to: https://partnerportal.zalando.com/partners/s/article/Zalando-onboarding-getting-started.
- At first you need to get in touch with the Zalando Partner Care, so that they can create an account at zDirect for you;
- When you have received access to the account, you can start the zDirect onboarding process;
- Finally, after being approved you need to setup your technical integration with one of Zalando its tech partners, which is mandatory from Zalando;
Having trouble with connecting your Woosa x Zalando technical integration? You can easily contact us via support.
2. Connect your WooCommerce website with the Zalando Marketplace
Once the onboarding procedure has been approved, what will be the next step? Integrate your WordPress website with Zalando. The ideal is to work with a plugin that facilitates this integration with Zalando (and, if possible, with some other marketplaces).
The easiest way to connect and achieve success, is by using the Zalando WooCommerce plugin.
The Zalando WooCommerce plugin by Woosa works as an integrator: you have your product information on WordPress, and the tool takes care of moving it to Zalando. This way, you ensure that your product information meets Zalando’s requirements and is always up to date.
What happens if you receive an order at Zalando? With the plugin, they will be imported directly to your online store. This synchronization allows you to streamline the management of all your orders and save time.
In short, thanks to the API connection that the Zalando WooCommerce plugin offers, you will make your integration with Zalando (and many other marketplaces) as simple as possible. This way, you can dedicate all those hours to boosting your business.
3. Receive orders
Start receiving orders from the Zalando marketplace, which will be automatically imported to your WooCommerce store and general order overview. In this way, all default order processes will continue wether it is a store related order or a Zalando order.
4. Send your package
You can print the corresponding labels and documents from its platform to create your package and send it.
5. Receive your monthly income
Zalando keeps a commission from every product you sell. But your benefits will be deposited each month through a transfer to your account.
Did you find this article interesting? Discover how to sell on Zalando in this simple guide I propose. You can read it here and start selling the products you have in your WordPress WooCommerce store.
