Zalando, OTTO and Allegro sequenced one platform per quarter

Zalando, OTTO and Allegro share a line in most European media plans and almost nothing else. Zalando sells brand media against an audience through ZMS. OTTO runs a sponsored-article auction on otto.de bound to your article numbers and to German product-data rules. Allegro is a self-service auction in zloty where offer quality moves your cost more than your bid does. We take one at a time, one per quarter, and on the six European programs we ran last year we started with Allegro four times, because it is the only one of the three where being wrong costs a five-figure sum rather than a six-figure one. Allegro: Sponsored offers and graphic ads, run against offer quality rather than around it. Month one is delivery declaration, Smart eligibility, parameter completeness and returns terms, because those decide what the same bid buys. Polish buyers compare landed cost with a discipline that surprises brands arriving from DACH, and an offer losing on total cost keeps losing at any bid. We set a ceiling per offer and let the losers lose. OTTO: Sponsored articles on otto.de, preceded by article-data work: EAN, Grundpreis, category attributes, delivery-time declaration. A partner article with thin data does not convert traffic you paid to send it. OTTO's audience skews older and buys home, furniture and household hard goods far above its apparel share, so the assortment worth pushing there is rarely the assortment that works on Zalando. We will tell you when the answer is that your range is wrong for the platform rather than your bidding. Zalando: We do not recommend buying ZMS media until you can read your own return reasons by size and colour. Apparel returns on Zalando run at levels that produce a healthy ROAS report and an unhealthy P&L in the same month. Once returns are legible, ZMS buys are planned against a specific launch or season with a defined end date, not as standing presence. Sequencing, and why we hold you to it: One platform per quarter. Each has its own onboarding, product-data schema, invoicing entity and characteristic way of failing. Three at once produces a plan nobody can attribute and an operations team that misses the returns problem in whichever one is quietest. If your board has already committed to all three being live by Q4, we are the wrong practice and we will say so on the first call rather than take the work and manage the disappointment later. What is not included: German or Polish copy. We brief structure, required attributes and image order; native writers execute. No VAT registration, OSS filing or fiscal representation. No EPR registration: we verify LUCID and BDO numbers exist before launch and we stop if they do not. No wholesale or 1P negotiation with Otto or Zalando buying teams. No warehouse or returns-address setup, though we will tell you plainly when a returns address in the wrong country is what is capping the account. Measurement: Per platform, always. There is no blended European ROAS in our reporting because there is no blended European market. Currencies differ, return behaviour differs, and the discount funding buried in each platform's promotional calendar differs. We report each platform's contribution after returns and after platform-funded promotion, monthly, in one file per platform, and we do not produce a combined headline number even when asked. Who this is not for: Brands without a European returns address. Brands whose product data lives in one spreadsheet maintained by one person who is also doing three other jobs. And brands who want all three platforms live because a competitor is on all three: the competitor is usually losing money on at least one of them, and you cannot tell which from the outside.