Zalando Shipping Solutions

Zalando Shipping Solutions (ZSS) enables partners to grow internationally and deliver on customer promises by leveraging Zalando’s transport infrastructure.

The ZSS process for orders requires REST calls to the following zDirect APIs:

ZSS orders belong to the order type PartnerFulfilled. Throughout the order life cycle the status of an order item can change to shipped, returned or canceled.

Best practice for updating a ZSS order to “shipped”

  1. Get the orders from the Orders API as described here.
  2. Once the orders are shown with the approved status, add the order number you are using in your system to the Zalando order as described here.
  3. Generate and download the ZSS shipping documents by calling the Shipping Documents API as described here.
  4. Update the tracking information via the Orders API as described here. The tracking IDs need to be mapped as followed:
    • Copy the value of tracking_id from the OUTBOUND_LABEL found in the ZSS shipping document to update tracking_number in the order.
    • Copy the value of tracking_id from the RETURN_LABEL found in the ZSS shipping document to update return_tracking_number in the order.
  5. Update all the products you are going to ship by setting their status to shipped in the Orders API as described here.

Best practice updating a ZSS order to “returned”

Partners do not need to provide an update to Orders API as Zalando will set the status to returned.
There’s no precise call to query the Orders API for ZSS returns. However, it is possible to keep track of returned items in two steps:

  1. Retrieving fulfilled orders from the Orders API with

GET merchants/{merchant_ID}/orders?include=order_items,order_lines&order_status=fulfilled&exported=true&order_type=PartnerFulfilled&page_number=0&page_size=1000&last_updated_after=[YYYY]-[MM]-[DD]T[hh]:[mm]:[ss]Z
2. Filtering out returns by parsing through the order item lines having the status returned.

Best practice updating a ZSS order line to “canceled”

  1. Get the orders from the Orders API as described here.
  2. Optional step: If any order lines are to be shipped, perform step 2 from Best practice for updating a ZSS order to “shipped” for those items.
  3. Update all the lines you are going to cancel by setting their status to canceled in the Orders API as described here.

Note: It’s not possible to cancel ZSS shipping documents. In case you canceled all products/lines of an order but generated the ZSS documents by accident, simply discard them. Zalando will not charge you as long as you don’t use them.



Currently ZSS is only available in some selected markets. Please refer to the table below for the latest updates:

Country/Region Status
Germany (de) LIVE
France (fr) LIVE
Belgium (be) LIVE
Netherlands (nl) LIVE
Finland (fi) LIVE
Sweden (se) LIVE
Denmark (dk) LIVE
Austria (at) LIVE
Italy (it) LIVE
Poland (pl) LIVE
Czech Republic (cz) LIVE
Spain (es) LIVE


For more information on the stages of integration, see Stages of Integration in the Getting Started Guide.

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