Marketplace vs. e-commerce: why Zalando accelerates your brand
Why marketplaces aren't competitors to your own site, and how to use marketplace cash flow to fund direct-site growth.
Read the article →Like Zalando, About You has strict rules on data structure, sizing and image quality, and just like Zalando, the first upload is where most brands lose the most time. I apply the same method: centralize the data, normalize it to the required standard, and automate updates instead of re-uploading the catalog by hand every time.
I prepare the catalog to the platform's required standards (product attributes, size mapping, unique identifiers) to avoid the rejections that block a catalog on first submission.
Syncing price, stock and availability with the other channels you already run, via integrator or direct connection, so About You doesn't become a channel you update by hand.
Checking images, descriptions and attributes before publishing, to cut review time and speed up time-to-market for new collections.
Order and returns management integrated with your ERP, with a margin-by-category view to understand if the channel is really contributing to profit, not just revenue.
I run multiple marketplaces in parallel, including Zalando and TikTok Shop, for real fashion brands like faraone.shop and Mamù. The advantage of a single point of contact across all channels is that price, stock and margin stay consistent everywhere, instead of being run by different vendors with different logic.