Optimising your Zalando Fulfilment Solutions network usage

This article explains the principles of Zalando’s largest fashion-specific fulfilment network. We want you to understand how we prioritise specific warehouses to fulfil orders for nearby markets and how this network configuration logic directly impacts your customer’s experience, including potential long-distance delivery fees. 

This article is for Partner Program partners who use Zalando Fulfilment Solutions (ZFS).

We’ve built Europe's largest fashion-specific fulfilment network, which is used by ZEOS to power our logistics services. Because our network is so vast, it’s vital that we optimise our network usage to guarantee fast, sustainable delivery options for all our customers.

This is why we created the network configuration logic. It’s a principle by which we prioritise specific warehouses and deprioritise, or even disconnect, those that are far away.

We distinguish between four connection types:

To keep delighting our customers with the widest possible assortment, we continue to offer stock located in 'long distance' warehouses. However, we flag these articles clearly to the customer, ensuring transparency on delivery times and cost.

Here’s how network configuration shows up for your customers:

The article will be flagged with a longer delivery time.

The customer is provided with a breakdown of the parcel split. A long-distance delivery fee is charged only once per order, even if the order contains multiple long-distance articles coming from separate warehouses.

The long-distance cost is covered by the customer. There are no changes to your Zalando Fulfilment Solutions cost structure.

To help you make informed decisions about what would be the most optimal distribution of your stock across our network, please review the table below for insight into the current configuration between markets and warehouses. We review and update our network configuration quarterly to ensure we continue to meet Zalando’s convenience standards. In the rare case we remove a connection, we’ll proactively communicate this to you ahead of time.

To get the most optimal usage of our network, we recommend you adopt our Inbound Distribution service between these two distribution strategies.

We highly recommend this service. You inbound your stock to one of our Inbound Distribution Centres in Germany or Poland, and we distribute it optimally based on historical customer sales data.

To enable this service, you must have international warehousing enabled. This allows us to fulfil customer orders for you from all our non-German warehouses. To enable this service, you must have international warehousing enabled. This allows us to fulfil customer orders for you from all our non-German warehouses.

If you prefer to manage distribution yourself, you must use the configuration table below to inform your decisions.

• Map your potential sales volumes per market.

• Confirm the Primary Warehouses for your key markets.

• Split your inbound shipments to those warehouses based on your customer share. This must be done at an EAN (European Article Number) level.

Below you will find an example of what that looks like: 

For more information on the Inbound Distribution service and International Warehousing, please refer to the ZFS International warehousing article on the Zalando Partner University.

If you continue to have questions about optimising your network configuration, submit a request via the support form using the topic: zDirect and request type: Business Profile.