Zalando Direct: Reducing the time to market for small scale partners

Within Zalando Direct I worked on a solution that enables small-scale partners to expand into new markets without the use of an API, a so-called "techless integration". This solution reduced the time to market for our partners and allows them to save costs on technical third parties.

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Problem Space

Zalando allows partners (brands, retailers) to sell their assortment on the Zalando platform. To start selling on Zalando, partners need to integrate with Zalando's price/stock/orders APIs. This requires IT capabilities, which can be provided by third parties or by the partners' own IT department.

One of the pain points are partners face is that those without IT capabilities are dependent on third party software developers (which oftentimes leads to choppy integration) or expensive 'integrators'. Even partners that do have their own IT capabilities face high costs and long integration time. This results in partners being hesitant to sign a contract with Zalando.

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Opportunity areas

To solve these pains, we wanted to offer (small scale) partners a 'techless' way to start selling their assortment on Zalando - without the use of APIs or IT capabilities.

This 'techless' way is a user interface where partners can set up their account, create articles, set prices for their assortment and set up logistics. This self-explanatory interface will attract more small scale partners, improve the time to market and reduce onboarding partner drop-outs.

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My contributions

Apart from offering UX support on designing the 'techless' user interface, I was also responsible to design a flow for market expansion.

Partners that already sell on Zalando and want to expand their markets or partners that want to start selling in multiple markets immediately also needed a way to integrate on the Zalando platform without the use of an API. Using the existing structures in place, I optimised these flows for market expansion.

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• Information architecture
• User Research
• User testing
• User flows
• Wireframing
• High-fidelity prototyping
• Design system

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Please reach out to me to view my full portfolio, including details about this project.

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