Zalando, Otto and Allegro Ads on Net Contribution

The number the platform will not give you: German fashion returns a large share of units, and across the accounts I have worked it runs between forty and sixty percent by category. A Zalando campaign reporting 4.0 ROAS on gross orders can sit under 2.0 once returns land sixty days later, and the platform reports the first figure. This project builds the second one and rebuilds bidding on top of it. The join that does the work: Ad exports from Zalando Marketing Services, OTTO's partner advertising reports and Allegro Ads are matched at EAN level against your own returns and settlement data, on a sixty-day window so each return posts against the order that caused it. Out of that comes contribution per style per platform after commission, fulfilment, outbound and return shipping, and refurbishment. Bid ceilings follow contribution. Styles that look profitable gross and are negative net stop being advertised, and in most catalogues that is a meaningful share of what is running today. Three platforms, three different auctions: Zalando's partner programme places your inventory inside their environment, where assortment depth and size curve move outcomes more than keyword craft. OTTO Market rewards feed quality and category placement, and its shopper differs enough from Zalando's that shared creative and shared bid logic are both mistakes. Allegro is a Polish price auction with the Smart badge as the conversion lever, priced in zloty against a euro cost base, so its ceilings move with FX and get recalculated monthly rather than once. Size curve as a media control: The most reliable saving here is not bid work. It is cutting spend on styles whose remaining sizes cannot serve the demand the ad creates. I will not advertise a style broken to two sizes, and rather than doing that by hand each week I write the rule into your feed logic so it holds after the project ends. What is delivered: The returns-adjusted contribution model as a working file your analyst can rerun. Per-platform bid ceilings derived from it. Rebuilt campaign structures in all three accounts. The size-curve suppression rule in your feed. A written decision on which of the three platforms deserves budget next season, including the case for dropping one. Not included: German, Polish and Dutch listing copy and translation. Zalando wholesale and buying-team negotiation, which is a different relationship from advertising and should stay with your commercial director. OTTO onboarding and integration engineering. Feed infrastructure builds, where I specify what the feed must contain and your team or feed vendor builds it. Returns reduction as an operational programme: I quantify the cost, I do not run the fix. Who should not buy this: Anyone who cannot export returns at EAN level with an order reference. Without that file the method fails and platform reporting substitutes for nothing. Brands selling to Zalando wholesale only, with no partner-programme inventory. Sellers who want three separate platform audits to compare, because the value here is one contribution model spanning all three and comparing them honestly. On timing: Book this in the eight weeks before a season lands rather than during peak. Run mid-season on a catalogue already marked down, the model produces conclusions that expire when the markdowns clear. I would rather refuse the timing than deliver that.