How Zalando Delivers Real-Time Insights to Its Partners Brands

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Disclaimer: The details in this post have been derived from the details shared online by the Zalando Engineering Team. All credit for the technical details goes to the Zalando Engineering Team. The links to the original articles and sources are present in the references section at the end of the post. We’ve attempted to analyze the details and provide our input about them. If you find any inaccuracies or omissions, please leave a comment, and we will do our best to fix them.

Zalando is one of Europe’s largest fashion and lifestyle platforms, connecting thousands of brands, retailers, and physical stores under one digital ecosystem.

As the company’s scale grew, so did the volume of commercial data it generated. This included information about product performance, sales patterns, pricing insights, and much more. This data was not just important for Zalando itself but also for its vast network of retail partners who relied on it to make critical business decisions.

However, sharing this data efficiently with external partners became increasingly complex.

Zalando’s Partner Tech division, responsible for data sharing and collaboration with partners, found itself managing a fragmented and inefficient process. Partners needed clear visibility into how their products were performing on the platform, but accessing that information was far from seamless. Data was scattered across multiple systems and shared through a patchwork of methods. Some partners received CSV files over SFTP, others pulled data via APIs, and many depended on self-service dashboards to manually export reports. Each method served a purpose, but together created a tangled system where consistency and reliability were hard to maintain. Many partners had to dedicate the equivalent of 1.5 full-time employees each month just to extract, clean, and consolidate the data they received. Instead of focusing on strategic analysis or market planning, skilled analysts spent valuable time performing repetitive manual work.

There was also a serious accessibility issue. The existing interfaces