How to enter Zalando, step by step for sellersZalando has no open sign-up. Here is the whole route: the invitation, the requirements, photography, fees, logistics and the 30-day returns you have to price in.
Author: Borys Terlecki · marketplace sales and implementations at Commercraft · updated: October 2026
In short
Zalando has no open sign-up: it invites brands into the Partner Program, and one contract opens 25 European markets, Poland among them.
The requirements are a 13-digit EAN for every SKU, KYC, legal representation and a return address in the EU, VAT settlement, EPR registrations and a minimum 30-day return window.
Zalando publishes no price list, so the rates sit in your contract and follow the category, the partnership model and whether you use ZFS logistics.
Zalando is Europe's largest fashion and lifestyle platform: 62 million active customers and 17.56 billion € in GMV in 2025. The Partner Program covers 25 European markets, and the group as a whole, with ABOUT YOU on board since 2025, reaches 29. For a clothing, footwear or beauty brand it is a potentially large sales channel, but entry follows different rules than a classic marketplace. Zalando is a curated platform, so before you size the opportunity it is worth understanding how the partnership works. Below we explain, step by step, how to enter Zalando and sell there effectively.
Zalando sells in two ways at the same time. It buys part of its assortment outright and resells it like a retailer, and it lets brands and sellers list their own stock through the Partner Program, which is the marketplace side of the business. A shopper sees no difference: the product page, the checkout and the returns process look the same either way.
As a partner you run the account in the zDirect portal, where product data, prices, stock and orders come together. Fulfilment stays with you or moves to Zalando Fulfilment Solutions. Consumer returns are free and run for 30 days.
More than 7,000 brands sell on the platform, so a fashion category is rarely empty. Your product data, photography, size charts and price decide whether an offer holds its place, not the fact that it is listed.
62 m
active customers
Zalando SE, 2025
17.56 bn €
GMV
in 2025
25
markets in the Partner Program
Poland included
7,000+
brands on the platform
partner.zalando.com
The two get mixed up because both say partner. An affiliate earns a commission for sending traffic to zalando.com and never owns or ships the goods. The Partner Program is the opposite arrangement: you sell your own products, set your own prices and keep the customer relationship. This guide covers the second one.
Zalando offers brands three paths:
One clarification, because this gets confused: ZFS, or Zalando Fulfilment Solutions, is a logistics service inside the Partner Program rather than a fourth partnership model. More on it below.
This is a key difference from other marketplaces: Zalando does not accept direct applications. To protect quality and brand safety, it invites only the brands it wants, and the first approach comes from Zalando. In practice there is nothing to sign up for. You build the brand, the data and the visibility that make you worth inviting, because the invitation into zDirect is issued by the Zalando team. A clean catalogue and a real position in the category move those odds.
Once cooperation goes ahead, specific requirements apply:
a 13-digit EAN for every SKU, and labelling that meets EU rules including GPSR,
a KYC questionnaire (a requirement stemming from anti-money-laundering regulations),
legal representation and a return address in the EU,
VAT settlement, local registration in the countries of sale or the OSS procedure,
EPR registrations for packaging and batteries in every EU country you sell into,
an IBAN for settlements,
compliance with Zalando Platform Rules and a minimum 30-day return window in every country you sell into.
The Partner Program covers 25 European markets. One contract therefore opens most of Europe, which is the strongest expansion argument the platform has. Requirements still vary by country: on zalando.pl the Beauty category is open, and a partner selling into Poland has to support cash on delivery as well as home and pick-up point delivery.
Zalando reported 278.6 million orders for 2025 and 62.5 million active customers in the second quarter of 2026. The group reaches 29 markets after the ABOUT YOU acquisition, while the Partner Program itself runs on 25, and that is the number that concerns you as a seller.
The core is fashion: clothing, footwear, accessories, lingerie, sport. On top of that comes Beauty (in selected markets, including Poland) and the growing lifestyle segment. Zalando is officially evolving from a fashion platform into a fashion-and-lifestyle ecosystem. The pre-owned category is open as well.
Zalando publishes no price list. The last fee change reported publicly dates from July 2023: a fixed fee of 480 € a year (40 € a month), commissions of 5-22% on Connected Retail and 7-25% on exclusive articles, plus a payment handling fee of 1.45-1.55%.
Today the rates sit in your contract and appear in the partner portal once it is signed. They follow the category, the partnership model and whether you use ZFS. When you size the opportunity, assume the upper end of the range and check whether the margin carries it. The ROI calculator does that arithmetic in euros.
Here we return to ZFS, Zalando Fulfilment Solutions. It is an end-to-end service: your goods sit in Zalando's pan-European warehouse network while you stay the owner, and Zalando packs, ships, takes the returns and answers the customer. One contract gives you the reach of all 25 programme markets, and consolidating several orders into one shipment brings the shipping cost down. Zalando does not publish ZFS pricing, so the case for it only adds up once you have the rates in your contract.
You can also ship from your own warehouse, but only with a carrier Zalando has approved for that country. The list changes, so check the current set in the partner portal before you sign anything with a courier. If you ship into the DACH markets from Central Europe, the corridor and its real costs are covered in our guide to cross-border logistics into DACH.
Zalando runs one of the strictest image standards in European fashion. The main packshot has to be shot on white, which Zalando turns into a light grey itself, while on-model shots can use any background. Files go in as sRGB JPGs in a 1:1.44 portrait ratio, from 762×1100 px, from 1800×2600 px for designer brands, with a 20 MB ceiling per file. Content generated with AI falls under separate labelling rules.
Every SKU needs a 13-digit EAN, complete fashion attributes and a size chart mapped to the right table. Gaps in that data are the usual reason an offer fails acceptance, or passes and then never shows up in the filters shoppers actually use.
There is no template generator on Zalando. You prepare the data on your side and feed it through attribute mapping, most often out of your PIM, your ERP or an integrator.
The minimum return window for a partner is 30 days in every country of sale. Zalando cut the consumer window from 100 days to 30 across the turn of 2024 and 2025 and kept returns free. More than 90% of returns were arriving within the first 30 days anyway, so the change mostly shortened the tail.
Fashion carries the highest return rate in e-commerce. In Germany it accounts for roughly 80% of all returned parcels, and one fashion seller in eight reports a rate above 50%. Price the cost of handling returns into your margin from day one.
Partner agencies put the working service levels at shipment confirmation within 12 hours, a return processed within 14 days and delivery in 2-4 working days.
Zalando decides for itself which items rank higher in a category. In our work on the channel, four things matter most: taking part in sales events, the season tag, size availability and how often an item comes back.
During events such as the mid-season sale, items without a discount of at least 10% dropped to lower visibility tiers in our experience. The tag matters too, because an item is marked either as a year-round basic or as seasonal. A seasonal item with no sales history can be moved to old season once the season ends, or blocked on a given market, and a markdown usually protects it. Plan discounts into your margin from day one. Discounts come with the channel.
Most fashion returns come down to size. When the account is set up, the brand picks the size chart its products are listed against, for example alphanumeric (XXS to XXL) or numeric. If that chart does not match the brand’s own shop, shoppers get mixed signals. Many then order two sizes to be safe. We have reviewed listings where the leg length in the size chart differed from the actual garment by well over ten centimetres.
Zalando gives you a few tools to keep this under control:
Keep this data in good shape, because items with a high share of size-related returns lose visibility. Shoppers never see it, but you will find it in your own data. To see what each percentage point of returns means for your margin, try the ROI calculator.
Zalando gathers the largest fashion audience in Europe in one place, with a strong Beauty segment and a growing lifestyle range. One contract opens 25 countries, which makes it the shortest expansion corridor a fashion brand can take. The entry bar is high, and that works in your favour once the catalogue, the photography and the logistics are ready before you talk to the platform.
We get a brand ready for the conversation with the platform: product data (EAN, attributes, size charts, card quality), photography to the Zalando standard, the formalities around VAT or OSS, EPR and GPSR, and a workable logistics model. Once the account is live we run it day to day: prices, stock, campaigns in Zalando Marketing Services and the quality metrics the platform watches.
Our Zalando page sets out how we run the channel and what that costs.
Sources: partner.zalando.com on partnership models, country-specific onboarding requirements and ZFS, read 18 September 2026, and its image guidelines, updated 1 October 2026; Zalando SE fact sheet for 2025 (12 March 2026) and Q2 2026 results (4 August 2026); the ABOUT YOU acquisition closing announcement (11 July 2025); ecommercenews.eu on the fee change (22 February 2023) and on the move to 30-day returns (January 2025); RetailDetail (23 April 2026) and FashionUnited (27 April 2026) on Connected Retail; German return figures from the University of Bamberg and EHI (2025); operating service levels reported by partner agencies.
Calculate the potential channel ROI yourself
Enter your revenue, margin, commission and shipping cost. The calculator shows the margin after commission, the month the channel breaks even and how running it with your own team compares with a managed service. Figures in euros, no sign-up.
Borys Terlecki – marketplace sales and implementations at Commercraft. He previously worked on the operator side of marketplace platforms (Mirakl, Munich) and today onboards brands on marketplaces in Poland and the DACH region and runs their accounts.
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