Manage your test order report and request

Zalando regularly checks your operational compliance through test orders to protect the customer experience. If your fulfillment parameters fail our quality assurance (QA) requirements, your assortment risks entering a low visibility (downsorted) state or temporary deactivation. This guide explains how to understand your test order reports and request a follow-up test order to continue or restore normal visibility to your assortment.

Make sure you have:

• Administrator or manager access permissions for your company account in zDirect.

• Active, eligible articles in the relevant Zalando store/s that are currently sold and shipped by your team.

We classify our quality assurance requirements into two priority levels depending on how they affect our customers:

These issues have a direct impact on customer satisfaction. Not fulfilling these requirements means that customers need to contact Customer Care far more often. 

• New partners: Missing these metrics prevents your brand from getting go-live approval in that specific country.

• Live partners: Your articles move to low visibility (or are “downsorted”) automatically. You have 15 days to correct the QA findings listed in your report. If you correct the findings, you can request another test order before the due date. Otherwise, we will initiate another test order after the due date. The visibility of your articles will be reassessed based on the results of the follow-up test order. 

These issues lower consumer experience and increase support requests.

• New partners: You can go live with normal visibility, but you must fix the issues within 30 days to avoid moving to low visibility.

• Live partners: Your articles will experience low visibility across the affected country until the settings match our standards.

Once you fix the blocker and/or downsorting requirements highlighted in your test order report, you can request a follow-up test order to restore your normal visibility.

1. Log in to zDirect and open your Daily performance overview.

2. Click the Current visibility status link for the affected country to open the Review outcome page.

3. Review your test order report details and click Continue to request.

4. Fill out the request form completely. Before you submit the form, please check that you have:

a. Fixed all previous issues, and 

b. You have eligible articles online in the relevant country that are sold and shipped by you 

5. Click Submit to finalise your request.

Your request status will change to In review under your Activities tab, and we'll launch a new test order for that country. You can track your real-time status updates here.

After assessing your compliance with our order quality requirements, we will only provide you with a test order report if one of the following has happened:

• Issues were identified and you need to improve your QA performance

• Your QA check outcome in a country has changed, e.g. from low visibility to normal visibility

• The go-live approval for a particular country has changed, e.g. from no go live to go live with no consequence

The test order report contains the following:

• All order quality requirements checked and results

• Description of issue/s

• Recommendations for corrective actions

• Photo/s demonstrating the issue/s identified in the test order

• Consequences depending on the results, e.g. low visibility, deactivation, normal visibility etc.

• Due date for corrections (if applicable)

• Additional feedback from test customers (optionally provided by the test customer. This can go beyond the scope of QA)

If you have any questions, please go to the support form. Select the topic: Customer Experience Model (CXM) and request type Question about my QA test order report.