Onboarding stage 4: Article onboarding

Congratulations on completing the article mapping stage of your onboarding journey! You’re now moving on to the article onboarding stage. This is where you’ll see your online shop take shape as your articles prepare to go live.

During this stage, you'll review your articles for any data errors, set your prices, complete a test order if needed, and confirm your invoicing setup.

• Verify that your articles are uploaded correctly to zDirect.

• Confirm your price validity.

• Prepare your logistics setup for either own fulfilment or Zalando Fulfilment Solutions (ZFS).

Please follow these four steps to complete your article onboarding.

After you share your article details, each article goes through validation steps before it can go online.

• Log into zDirect and open your Article listing module to track your articles’ status, stock and price in real time.

• Check the Issues column for your article status codes. Select the Information icon next to any error to view resolution steps. 

• Ensure your articles display an approved status code, such as ZABLO_13 or ZANOS_01 (for ZFS partners).

Verify that all your price updates are accurate in zDirect.* 

Once your articles are successfully onboarded to Zalando, coordinate with our warehouse to fulfil customer orders. Ensure you:

• Manage your forecast and shipments via the Fulfilment section on zDirect. 

• Submit a rolling 16-week volume forecast to the ZFS warehouse to secure your capacity.

• Generate and submit your Shipping Notice via zDirect and track its status lifecycle.

• ZFS Shipping notice request - process overview

• Create shipping notices in zDirect

• Check your assigned inbound warehouse locations and their specific receiving hours before dispatching stock.

• Zalando Fulfilment Solutions inbound warehouse locations and receiving hours

• If you want to sell in France or Belgium via ZFS, you’re legally required to generate an invoice for every order you sell on Zalando. Depending on your company, warehouse location or market, you might also need to include invoices inside your customer parcels. Our e-invoicing service, Invoister, automates this by sending invoices directly to your customers via email. Reach out to our Partner Care team through the support form to set up your Invoister configuration. Select the topic Onboarding and request type Article Onboarding.

If you use a direct API integration or Zalando Shipping Solution (ZSS), your Onboarding Manager will email you to initiate a test order option 2 once you have at least one approved article in status ZABLO_13. 

• Your Onboarding Manager puts the SKU online.

• You buy the article and ship it to the provided test address. 

• Provide the tracking link and Zalando order number to your Onboarding Manager once dispatched.

• Prepare for test order quality assurance

If you use own fulfilment, provide your availability to your Onboarding Manager to schedule your Customer Experience Model (CXM) enablement session.

• Introduction to the Customer Experience Model (CXM)

Your integrator will track data validation rejections and insert missing information directly into your product data feed.

Your integrator will ensure that active updates reflect correctly within our systems.

If you use your own fulfilment, work with your integrator to set up documents for your active markets and email them to your Onboarding Manager.

We’ll provide you with feedback and guide you through active error validation to get your assortment online quickly.

We’ll confirm your stock and prices are received and check if status is ZABLO_13 or ZANOS_01 (for ZFS partners), as well as set up customer price rules.

We’ll inform you and your integrator if a test order is needed and provide instructions.

We’ll share the CXM educational deck with you and schedule your enablement session. If this session applies to you, your Onboarding Manager will contact you to request your availability.

• Maintain stock availability: Keep all your live articles on Zalando in stock and ready for customers.

• Tag your seasons accurately: Classify your products as year-round basic articles or link them to active seasonal collections.

• Choose your assortment type: You can expand your catalog by creating an incremental assortment or use an overlapping assortment.

• Monitor your articles closely: If your articles are rejected and you don't resolve the data error, your assortment will remain stuck and cannot go live. Review the Status column to monitor verification progress, and track issue codes under the Issues column in your Article listing dashboard.

• Prepare in advance: Get familiar with how to prepare for test orders and the delivery documents to avoid delays in onboarding.

• Prepare for test order quality assurance

• Delivery documentation

If you have a direct onboarding contact at Zalando, reach out to them directly with questions. Otherwise, open a request via our support form. Please select the topic Onboarding and request type Article Onboarding.

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  Onboarding stage 5: Final revision and Go live

  Here you'll find helpful information and links about the final part of your onboarding journey.