ChatGPT ads for brands selling on Zalando and Otto

Published 20 September 2026 · Updated 20 September 2026 · Fees checked against Zalando's and OTTO's own partner pages on 20 September 2026

If you sell on Zalando and OTTO, you already know the shape of the deal. The marketplace brings the shopper, takes a percentage of every sale, and then sells you a second product, on-platform visibility, to be seen ahead of the brand next to you. Your product sits in their template, in their grid, under their filters, beside competitors you did not choose. Advertising in ChatGPT sits at a different point in the same journey: it reaches someone who has not yet decided which store to open, and it lets you speak in your own words. This guide sets out what each marketplace charges, what its visibility products add, where the two differ in ways that change the decision, and what a ChatGPT campaign can and cannot do in the EEA.

Zalando and Otto sell you a percentage of the sale, then sell you visibility on top

Both marketplaces run the same two-part model. Part one is a commission on every sale plus a monthly access fee, which buys placement in a catalogue alongside every other brand in your category. Part two is an advertising business sold separately, Zalando Marketing Services on one side and OTTO Advertising on the other, which buys a better position in that same catalogue. Paying twice is normal on a curated marketplace, and neither payment gives you control over how your brand reads next to a competitor's.

That second point is the one brand managers underrate. On both platforms the page is built from their template, their image rules and their attribute taxonomy, so your positioning is compressed into a title, a set of filters and a price. The marketplace decides the grid; you decide only what goes in the cells.

An ad inside a ChatGPT conversation sits before that grid exists. The shopper is still describing the problem, and a chat card is your sentence, not a row in someone else's table. The mechanics of that surface, and how it differs from a keyword auction, are covered in how ads in ChatGPT differ from search and social ads.

Zalando charges a fee structure it does not publish

Zalando's partner site names the components of the Partner Program fee structure, a platform base fee, a Marketplace Service fee, a Payment Service fee and a Convenience Incentive, and flags an updated structure effective 1 January 2026, but it does not publish the percentages. They sit behind the partner login and are set per category and per contract. Checked on partner.zalando.com on 20 September 2026.

What is public is the scale you are buying into. Zalando reports 29 markets, 62 million active customers and more than 7,000 brands, from corporate.zalando.com as of 20 September 2026. One contract reaches that whole footprint, which is the strongest argument for the platform and the reason most fashion brands accept terms they cannot benchmark in advance.

Figures that circulate publicly, a base fee of around EUR 40 a month and a commission band of roughly 5% to 25% by category, come from trade and integrator sources rather than from Zalando, and our own fee reference of 22 May 2026 carries them as secondary and negotiated rather than as a rate card. Use them to sanity-check an offer, not to model a business case.

Fulfilment is a separate decision with separate fees. Zalando Fulfilment Solutions charges per item inbound, per item per day for storage, per order for pick, pack and ship and per returned package for return processing, plus cross-border and non-compliance charges, with an extra EUR 0.15 per outbounded item in the peak window of 15 October to 31 January and a variable fuel floater. The euro amounts are contractual and not public. In fashion, where return rates commonly run at 30% to 50%, that per-return handling fee lands on every return and often decides whether a category is worth listing.

On-platform visibility runs through the ZMS Ad Manager inside zDirect, with Sponsored Products, in dynamic and selected variants, and Sponsored Collections for homepage teasers and carousels. Zalando publishes no price for it.

Otto publishes its commission grid, and it is tiered by price

OTTO Market is unusually open about what it charges. Its public assortment overview lists a commission per product group, with rates dated 1 April 2026, on top of a monthly basic fee that otto.market states as EUR 99.90 regardless of how many products you offer, and a payment fee of 2.7% given in its FAQ. Checked on otto.market on 20 September 2026.

The commission is tiered on the sales price share, not flipped on a threshold, so a higher price does not reprice the whole item. The published fashion rates read as follows:

OTTO's operating model shows up in your cost base rather than your fee schedule. OTTO Payments sits between the customer and you and OTTO keeps the customer relationship, but the seller ships, handles returns through OTTO's return labels and must offer German-speaking customer service, with return warehouses in Germany or an approved EU country and the seller company registered in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, France, Spain or another accepted jurisdiction. All from otto.market, checked 20 September 2026.

OTTO's visibility products are Sponsored Product Ads, placed in search results, product lists, detail pages and inside the purchase process, and Sponsored Display Ads, which run on otto.de and across more than 1,500 German web and app partners. As with Zalando, no prices are published; OTTO Advertising quotes individually.

The difference that matters is reach against transparency

Zalando gives you 29 markets on one contract and will not tell you the rate until you sign. OTTO gives you one German storefront and tells you the rate before you apply. Only Zalando is a European expansion decision; only OTTO can be modelled to two decimal places without a signed contract in front of you.

Three further differences change how you plan. Fulfilment: Zalando offers a first-party route through ZFS where the per-return handling fee lands on you on every return, while OTTO is seller-fulfilled, so your return cost is your own carrier and warehouse cost rather than a marketplace fee. Pricing: OTTO's tiered commission means a premium item pays a lower marginal rate on the top slice of its price, which quietly favours higher price points, whereas a Zalando category rate is contractual and cannot be flexed by repricing. Service: OTTO expects German-speaking customer service from you, while Zalando's reach implies service across many languages.

Advertising in ChatGPT reaches the shopper before a marketplace is chosen

A ChatGPT ad is served inside a conversation, frequently the step before a store is opened at all. Someone describing a wardrobe problem, a gift or a fit issue has not yet chosen between a marketplace, a brand site and a high street shop. That is a moment neither Zalando nor OTTO sells, because neither sees it.

The mechanics are simple. A campaign carries an objective, a budget, a schedule and targeting by location and platform. An ad group carries a bid strategy and up to 2,000 free-text context hints, intent descriptions matched by meaning rather than keywords; writing them is covered in contextual targeting and context hints in ChatGPT ads. There are two creative types. A chat card is a title of 3 to 50 characters, a body of up to 100 characters, an image of at least 640 by 640 pixels and a destination URL. A product ad template pulls image, URL and price from a feed item, with one live template per feed ad group.

The feed is the piece most marketplace brands already half own. It uses OpenAI's Agentic Commerce product file schema, uploaded over SFTP, a hosted URL or manually, so the catalogue you maintain for Zalando or OTTO has to be transformed rather than reused as is, as set out in OpenAI product feeds versus Google Merchant Center feeds.

Two constraints matter. Everything is created paused and goes through ad review, so there is a lead time before serving, and the budget is an average: Ads Manager states maximum daily spend is twice the daily budget and maximum seven-day spend seven times it. Set guardrails against the doubled figure; budget mechanics in full are in budgets, pacing and bidding strategies for ChatGPT ads.

Custom audiences are unavailable for EEA and Switzerland campaigns, which is most of this market

Custom audiences are not available for campaigns targeting the EEA or Switzerland. For a brand on Zalando and OTTO that is close to the whole addressable market: Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Poland and the rest of the EEA all fall inside it. You cannot upload your customer list, build a lookalike from it, or exclude existing customers from a German campaign.

What remains is enough to run a real campaign, but it changes how you brief one. Targeting is locations from OpenAI's geo target list, eligible platforms and the context hints, which carry most of the weight, so the discipline shifts from audience building to describing intent precisely. Regional differences across the EEA, the United States and Asia are covered in ChatGPT ads in the US, EU and Asia.

One more detail belongs in the same conversation as speaking in your own words. Ads Manager carries a text customization toggle that lets the platform generate personalised and translated versions of your headlines and descriptions, which may be shown without your individual review. It is a per-campaign choice and does not appear in the API. If your reason for advertising here is to control your own language, either leave it off or record which campaigns have it on.

What Zalando and Otto do better than any ad you can buy

They own the parts of the purchase a shopper worries about. Checkout is theirs, payment is theirs, the returns process is theirs to define, and the trust that carries a first-time buyer over the last hesitation is theirs and not yours. A shopper who has never heard of your brand often prefers to buy it from a store they already have an account with, and that preference is rational.

The list is longer than most brand managers give them credit for. On OTTO, customers have passed a credit assessment and OTTO Payments stands between you and them, so payment risk is not your problem. On Zalando, the return experience is a large part of why customers buy fashion there at all, and ZFS will run the physical side of it. Both run a catalogue a shopper can browse, filter and check stock in, and both bring demand you do not have to create.

So the honest framing is not that marketplace fees are bad value. They are the price of demand you did not generate and a checkout you did not build, and that price is fixed however well your brand is known. An ad in ChatGPT replaces none of it; it works on the one thing the marketplaces cannot sell you, being the brand the shopper is already thinking about.

How a brand on both marketplaces should split the budget

Keep marketplace advertising for the shopper in the aisle and add ChatGPT ads for the shopper still deciding. Sponsored Products on Zalando or OTTO compete for a ranking position against brands the shopper is already comparing you with; a chat card competes for a mention before that comparison starts. They rarely bid for the same moment, so the question is not which to cut but what the earlier moment is worth.

Measure it deliberately, because a ChatGPT ad can send a shopper to your own site or to your marketplace listing, and the second route reports as a marketplace sale. Use the tracking template, which appends your parameters at account, campaign, ad group or ad level, and read the insights on their own terms: order_created_attributed_sales and order_created_roas run to ad group and ad level, with no prompt or query level data. Attribution across channels is in measuring ChatGPT ads with GA4, UTMs and incrementality, and the marketplace comparison logic in ChatGPT ads versus Amazon Ads carries over almost unchanged to Zalando and OTTO.

On creative, resist the temptation to paste marketplace copy: a title written to survive OTTO's attribute rules is written for a filter, not a person, and a chat card's 50 characters of title and 100 of body read closer to how a good salesperson opens; writing ChatGPT ad creative and chat cards covers the craft.

Adsonomy runs the ChatGPT side of this. Nomy, the AI manager, drafts and adjusts campaigns within the guardrails and policy you set, and builds product ads from your feed. It does not manage Zalando or OTTO campaigns, and Adsonomy is not affiliated with OpenAI, Zalando or OTTO.

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