EmpoweringOurPartners

Being digital is not always easy. Zalando has developed cutting-edge digital capabilities over the last 9 years. Now we are making these available to help our partners. This is Partner Solutions

Our Digital Toolbox to Help Our Partners

Partner Solutions provides a broad portfolio of services and products such as Partner Program, Consumer Insights and Connected Retail aimed at helping our partners overcome their biggest pain along their digital value chain leveraging technology and data as our core assets.

With Partner Solutions we are
making Zalando’s digital
capabilities available to brands
and retailers.

Our portfolio ranges from digital strategy, to wholesale buying, marketplace integration, more choice and better availability of products via the Partner Program as well as omnichannel steering. Here are a few examples:

Digital strategy – Brands struggle to understand consumers as more and more data is generated in social media (e.g., Facebook) and on fashion platforms like Zalando. Hence, we founded Consumer Insights making data available and technology that we utilize to understand consumers.

Omnichannel – Many of our partners used to trade only on proprietary channels (e.g., own webshop). With the acquisition of Tradebyte and Anatwine, we have further strengthened our ability to integrate partner inventory from their fulfillment centers as well as from their local stores via the Partner Program. Omnichannel finally becomes reality.

Assortment – Via our Partner Program, brands can integrate their stock directly into the Zalando Fashion Store. The resulting broader assortment and higher product availability extends Zalando’s customer base – which, in turn, draws more brands to the platform. In exchange, brands control the assortment, prices and brand representation.

Partner Solutions unlocks the true potential of digital for our partners along the entire value chain. More than 200 partners are already leveraging our products and we have seen strong double-digit growth in the Partner Program. We will further accelerate our investments into software-based solutions to enable seamless digital integration for brands and retailers.“

DR. CARSTEN KELLER
VP DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER

We give our partners an overview
of who is actually buying their
products, allowing them to target
their marketing activities and
become even more successful.

Partners Benefit From Reliable Solutions

All brands have different approaches, requirements and capabilities. Partner Solutions empowers brands and retailers with a portfolio of services tailored to their specific needs. With our portfolio of solutions, we can accelerate our partners’ growth momentum and generate vast efficiencies in all steps of the digital value chain.

All this ties in with our platform strategy, which is aimed at connecting the different players in the fashion industry. Our partners benefit from leading solutions that are fast, reliable and focused firmly on their needs.

With Partner Solutions we are making Zalando’s digital capabilities available to brands and retailers, we leverage our data to empower their digital strategies and we connect stock to unlimited demand across various platforms. “Partner Solutions unlocks the true potential of digital for our partners along the entire value chain. More than 200 brand partners are already leveraging our products and we have seen strong double-digit growth in the Partner Program. We will further accelerate our investments into software-based solutions to enable seamless digital integration for brands and retailers”, says Dr. Carsten Keller, VP Direct-to-Consumer.

Consumer insights allows Zalando’s brand partners to establish a holistic understanding of their customers at Zalando so that they can derive data-based insights, strategies and actions to boost their business.

In September 2017, we connected schuhe.de to the Zalando Partner Program. This gives us the opportunity making the stock of more than 600 stores available via the Zalando platform in the future.

The interface routes customer orders directly to physical stores associated to schuhe.de. The store can accept the order and delivery is triggered via couriers shipping the product from the store to the customer. The collaboration gives physical stores easy access to the world of e-commerce via our platform.

In the first phase of this partnership, we connected four local stores as part of schuhe.de. Integration into the Zalando platform provides them with an additional sales channel and access to a wide customer base, allowing them to establish and grow business.

This has proven to be a great success: in the first week alone, the four stores received more than 450 orders a day via Zalando. In other words, the partnership is benefiting our customers and the stores alike – the store’s enjoy more business, while our customers receive products directly from a local store thanks to the Zalando Partner Program.

The four stores
received more than

450orders a day via
Zalando.

Connecting Brands and Retailers

The global B2B fashion market is undergoing a massive wave of digitization. When it comes to processes, the fashion wholesale industry is still fairly conservative. Pen-and-paper solutions remain the norm in a lot of cases. Digitizing the wholesale experience and connecting brands and retailers through simple online solutions offers vast potential for the future of the B2B fashion industry.

This is why, in 2017, we decided to invest in FashionTrade. A joint venture between Zalando and the Danish fashion group Bestseller, FashionTrade offers retailers and brands a shared platform for digital buying. Brands maintain their stock data in the system, and retailers can assemble their product range in a single basket.

While connecting brands and retailers on the FashionTrade platform generates significant efficiencies, the true power of the marketplace will stem from analytics, that help the retailers in choosing the right articles and quantities to optimize sell through.

In the conventional model, a team of buyers from a retailer travels directly to a brand’s head office or showroom/trade fair and views their products on-site. They then sit down with pen and paper or Excel sheets and submit their order to the brand. This is done separately for each brand.

We have strengthened our ability
to integrate partner inventory
from fulfillment centers and
stores with the most productive
direct-to-consumer channels in
Europe and beyond.

FashionTrade makes the whole process easier and more efficient. It digitizes the brands’ product offering, allowing the buying teams – from small boutiques and chains to medium-sized retailers – to click through the various items from the comfort of their office and add them to their shopping cart. All in the virtual world, with no need for long journeys. And if a retailer notices that a product is doing particularly well that season, FashionTrade makes it easy for them to reorder.

As well as being considerably more efficient, this process ensures that the range of products available to the retailer is transparent at all times. FashionTrade also links all of the items so that retailers can easily search for similar products from multiple brands.

Target Their Marketing Activities and Become More Successful

It is important for us to understand our partners’ needs and constantly check how satisfied they are and what improvements we need to make in terms of our processes and product offering in order to make the partnership even more relevant for them.

One key insight from our surveys was that brands wanted better access to customer data about their products. To achieve this, we started Consumer Insights, an analysis tool that delivers precise, relevant and anonymized data on purchasing behavior based on factors such as age, gender, or sales of specific products by postcode area but also customer behavior.

“Consumer Insights is a dedicated B2B service that mines Zalando’s rich data assets. It allows Zalando’s brand partners to establish a holistic understanding of their customers at Zalando so that they can derive data-based insights, strategies and actions to boost their business. Consumer Insights creates and offers self-service web interfaces and customized analyses’ and consumer surveys for this purpose”, summarizes Martin-Ruben Schmidt, Head of Consumer Insights at Zalando.

The tool gives our partners an overview of who is actually buying their products, allowing them to target their marketing activities and become even more successful. Consumer Insights was launched in April 2017 and has already provided our partners with some very useful insights.

We founded Consumer insights
making data available and
technology that we utilize to
understand consumers.

MARTIN RUBEN SCHMIDT
HEAD OF CONSUMER INSIGHTS

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