Which marketplace should I start with?

Almost always wherever your category has the most demand – in Germany that's usually Amazon, in fashion also Zalando, and for home and family ranges, OTTO. More important than the choice is the mode: properly learn one marketplace (content, logistics integration, advertising logic) before adding a second. Three half-heartedly run channels lose out against one that's mastered.

How much revenue share through one marketplace is still healthy?

There's no hard limit, but a rule of thumb: once a single channel accounts for clearly more than half your revenue, its rule changes, fee increases and suspension risks effectively run your business. At the latest by that point, diversification – a second marketplace, your own store – belongs on the roadmap, even if the dominant channel is growing more comfortably.

How many marketplaces should I run in parallel?

There's no blanket number, but practice shows a clear pattern: two or three well-run channels almost always beat five half-heartedly run ones, because every marketplace brings its own content, logistics and advertising requirements. It makes sense to get one channel to a stable, profitable level before adding the next. Start too broad too early and you spread attention instead of building depth.

What do I do if a marketplace suspends my account?

First, read the exact reasoning for the suspension in the partner or seller centre – most suspensions cite a specific rule violation that can be disputed or fixed with clean documentation. In parallel, immediately check how quickly other channels can absorb the lost revenue, because appeals often take days to weeks. This exact scenario is the core of the dependency risk – a second leg pays off in precisely this moment.

Do I need separate product photos for every marketplace?

Technically, one central image pool is often enough, but the requirements genuinely differ: Zalando and About You frequently demand stricter image guidelines and model photography than Amazon or OTTO. If you manage core images centrally in high resolution, you can derive channel-specific crops and formats from them, instead of shooting from scratch for every marketplace.

E-commerce · Marketplaces

Marketplace Strategy: Amazon, OTTO & Zalando as a Portfolio

Marketplace strategy for Amazon, OTTO and Zalando: comparing channel characters, a per-SKU margin calculation, and managing dependency in your portfolio.

By Boaz Lichtenstein

Article image: Marketplace Strategy: Amazon, OTTO & Zalando as a Portfolio

For most German retailers, there’s no way around marketplaces: a substantial share of online retail runs through Amazon & co, and if you’re not visible there, you simply don’t exist for many groups of customers. The second sentence is just as true: no channel can damage a business as fast as a marketplace can – through a fee increase, a rule change or an account suspension, each without negotiation. The right stance is therefore neither refusal nor surrender, but portfolio thinking: marketplaces are positions with return and risk that you weight deliberately.

Key takeaways

Marketplaces are portfolio positions with return and risk, not a single revenue channel with side effects.
Every channel has its own character – “let’s just copy our Amazon setup” is a misunderstanding, not a strategy.
The margin calculation belongs at SKU level per channel, not at overall revenue level.
Once a channel accounts for over half your revenue, diversification becomes mandatory.
Product content, stock and prices should flow from your own systems (PIM/ERP), not from marketplace tools.

The channels and their characters

Every major marketplace demands its own logic around content, fees and competitive intensity – ignore that logic and run every channel identically, and you give away revenue on all of them at once:

Channel	Character	Content requirement	Fee logic (rough)
Amazon	Demand giant, toughest competition	High, SEO-optimised listings	Sales commission + ad spend + possibly fulfilment
Zalando / About You	Curated partner model, strong brand environment	Very high, photo quality, logistics tier	Commission plus content and logistics requirements
OTTO	Open marketplace, less crowded	Medium	Commission, strong reach
Niche platforms (Kaufland, ManoMano, Etsy…)	Category strength over breadth	Variable	Usually lower barriers to entry

Amazon is the demand giant: unbeatable reach and conversion, but the toughest competition, growing advertising necessity, and the least tolerance for rule violations. Anyone who wants to hold their ground here can hardly avoid solid listing optimisation. Zalando and About You work as curated partner models: more brand environment, but with requirements around content, logistics tier and range. OTTO has evolved into an open marketplace and offers German retailers a high-reach, less crowded environment. On top of that come niche and category platforms that turn out surprisingly strong in individual ranges.

The calculation per channel – not per revenue

Marketplace revenue flatters; marketplace margin sobers up. Sales commission, fulfilment fees, advertising costs, returns and promotional discounts add up, depending on category, to a substantial share of the sale price. A worked example makes that concrete – rounded, illustrative assumptions for a product with a €50 sale price: sales commission roughly 15 percent (€7.50), fulfilment fees around €5, advertising costs at a 12 percent ACOS around €6, allocated returns costs around €2. With cost of goods of €20, that leaves a contribution margin of around €9.50 – barely 19 percent of the sale price, considerably less than pure revenue suggests.

On a second channel with a different fee structure, the same product can land at 25 percent or at 12 percent contribution margin. Which is why: every channel gets its own margin calculation, right down to SKU level. It’s entirely normal for a product to be profitable on one marketplace and not on another – and that’s exactly the view that steers your portfolio: range by channel, not everything everywhere. If you want to sharpen this logic further, you’ll find more calculation approaches in our article on unit economics in e-commerce.

Managing dependency

Three rules keep concentration risk in check. First: diversify once you hit dominance – once a channel grows past half your revenue, building a second leg becomes mandatory, not optional. Second: data sovereignty – marketplaces keep the customer relationship; all the more reason for product content, stock and prices to flow from your own systems (PIM/ERP), so a new channel becomes a connection rather than a rebuild. Third: compliance as a discipline – account health, delivery performance and rule updates belong on the table weekly, because the existential danger on marketplaces is rarely the competitor. It’s your own, avoidable violation.

Advertising costs as their own steering metric

On mature marketplaces, organic visibility alone is rarely enough – advertising costs are therefore not optional, but a fixed part of the channel calculation that needs to be costed just as honestly as commission and fulfilment. Anyone who treats ad budget as an “extra” outside the margin calculation systematically underestimates how profitable a channel really is.

The ACOS or TACOS ratio (advertising cost relative to revenue) should therefore be tracked per channel and, where possible, per category, not just as one overall company metric. A channel with lower commission but heavy required ad pressure can end up delivering less contribution margin than a channel with higher commission but strong organic demand. Marketplaces increasingly offer their own retail media space too, which – used properly – can also be deployed strategically to buy visibility in a targeted way rather than across the board.

From experience: a channel whose advertising-cost share keeps climbing steadily over several months, without the organic share growing alongside it, usually loses structural attractiveness – competition and bidding pressure rise faster than your own visibility. Spotting this trend early is one of the best leading indicators for when a second channel should be built, well before the numbers make it unavoidable.

The most common mistakes in marketplace strategy

Five patterns regularly cost retailers revenue or accounts:

Identical setup across every channel: transferring Amazon content 1:1 to Zalando, even though the requirements differ. Fix: adapt the content format per channel.
Calculating margin only overall, not per SKU: obscures which products actually earn on which channel. Fix: maintain an SKU-by-channel matrix.
Only tackling diversification after a suspension: the second channel only gets built once the first has already collapsed. Fix: start diversifying before reaching the dominance threshold.
Maintaining product data in marketplace tools instead of your own PIM: turns every new channel into a rebuild instead of a connection. Fix: establish your own system as the single source of truth.
Only checking compliance when problems arise: account health only gets reviewed after a warning. Fix: introduce a fixed weekly check.

When to grow your own store, when to expand marketplaces

The portfolio question doesn’t end with marketplaces among themselves – in the long run, your own store also belongs in the picture as a channel, especially for cushioning dependency and for the direct customer relationship. As rough criteria: marketplaces win for pure reach expansion and fast scaling; your own store wins for brand building, data ownership and long-term margin. You’ll find a detailed comparison with decision criteria in our article Own store vs marketplace.

As revenue grows, the same question comes back in a second form: does the next investment go into another marketplace or into your own store? A further marketplace pays off when your category demonstrably has demand there and your team has the capacity to actually run the channel well – not just connect it technically. Your own store gains priority as soon as dependency on a dominant channel becomes noticeable, or the customer relationship becomes strategically more important than the next short-term revenue bump.

Neither option rules out the other – most successful multi-channel retailers build both in parallel, just with different weighting depending on growth phase. In the early phase, marketplace focus usually dominates, because it delivers revenue faster; as maturity grows, the weight increasingly shifts towards your own store and the direct relationship.

The bottom line

For most German retailers, marketplaces aren’t an either-or – they’re a portfolio that wants active management, with its own margin calculation per channel, a weekly compliance routine, and a clear threshold beyond which diversification becomes mandatory. The sensible next step: honestly write out your own revenue split across channels and check whether a single channel has already crossed the halfway threshold.