Selling successfully on OTTO Market
Introduction
As one of the leading online marketplaces in Germany, OTTO Market offers companies a platform to make their products accessible to a broad audience and to strengthen their presence in digital commerce.
To make the most of the potential on OTTO Marketplace, shopvibes, an official partner of OTTO Market, offers a central solution to manage, optimize and exchange all data with OTTO Market in one place.
How does OTTO Market work?
OTTO once started as a classic mail order business. Today, they focus on their online business. There are two main ways you can sell products on the OTTO online platforms. One is the classic B2B model, where you sell your products to OTTO, and OTTO resells them on their online shop under their own name. The other way is the marketplace model, where you use the platform infrastructure of OTTO Market to list your products directly on the shop and sell it under your own name.
The key differences are that, in the B2B model, the product is “sold by OTTO”, whereas in the marketplace model, the product is “sold by your company”.
This has implications for the handling of first level customer support, return management but also strategic implications for how you act in the market. Another key difference is that in the B2B model, OTTO will set the retail price the end customer pays, whereas in the marketplace model, you set the retail price for the end customer.
With OTTO Partner Connect, OTTO offers a user backend to manage all company, product and order information. However, in OTTO Partner Connect, you will obviously only see products and orders from OTTO. If you are selling on more channels or platforms, it makes sense to use a multi-channel software such as shopvibes, that aggregates and synchronizes data and orders from all your partners and channels.
Why should I sell on OTTO Market?
With over 11 million active users, 2.9 million qualified visitors per day and up to 10 orders per second, the OTTO Marketplace with its high reach represents an ideal growth opportunity for your business.
OTTO's maxim "We only offer customers goods that we would buy ourselves" guarantees clear retailer criteria and thus a qualitative product environment.
Furthermore, OTTO Market takes over the complete payment processing with their payment provider OTTO Payment, so that you can concentrate on your own business.
They offer you a close partnership to make selling on the marketplace as easy and convenient as possible, so that both parties can benefit from each other and reach their goals.
Become a partner and sell on OTTO Market
Participating in the OTTO Marketplace as a partner opens up promising opportunities to increase their reach and visibility. But how does one become a partner on this platform? The process is deliberately designed to be accessible to companies of different sizes, but it is important to meet certain criteria and requirements, which we will explain below.
- Step: Registration
The first step is the registration, where you provide basic data about your company. On this basis OTTO checks if you meet the criteria and requirements and thus gives you access to the Partner Connect Portal.
Basic requirements to sell at OTTO Market:
- You have the German legal form of a company, a German VAT ID and your registered office is in Germany (excluded small entrepreneurs according to § 19 UStG)
- You act as a seller to end customers
- You offer a German-speaking customer service
- You ship from a German warehouse
- You sell products with a standard VAT rate of 19%
- Step: Onboarding
This step is about the contract-check and the contract-conclusion. The retailer can enter their master data into the portal and prepare for selling on OTTO. Master Data means more detailed information about your company, i.e. credit rating or risk assessment, as well as information about your shipping process and products. These are important as you must meet further certain criteria which are included in this checklist (link)
- Step: Product data maintenance
With this step your journey on OTTO really begins, as you can now start adding your products on OTTO and start selling. You can add your products manually one by one in the OTTO Partner Connect or upload a complex MS Excel file that you’ve manually prepared. For the upload you need to gather your complete product content and media in an MS Excel sheet so that OTTO can handle it. Since manual product data maintenance is a time-consuming process, we recommend the all-in-one product data management software from shopvibes for this purpose. With shopvibes, you can manage, optimize and share all product data and media in one central place to provide high-quality data in the right format for OTTO Market.
- Step: Shipping & Returns
Great, you got your first orders on OTTO Market! You will now need to process the order, collect all relevant information from OTTO Market and inform OTTO about the status of the order. This can be done manually via MS Excel or the OTTO Partner Connect - or you can use the automated solution of shopvibes! Shopvibes automatically collects all orders from OTTO Market, syncs it with your internal ERP and pushes back the info about the processed orders to OTTO Market. You already have a solution in place for order management? Great, we are flexible to integrate with other systems or just support you with your product data management.
- Step: Payment
A big advantage of OTTO Market is that they take care of all payment transactions with the customer. In addition, your OTTO balance is transferred in weekly payments.
- Step: Reporting
In the Partner Portal, OTTO offers analyses of sales and other KPIs that allow you to quickly find out what is going well and what you still need to work on.
What does it cost to sell on OTTO Market?
Companies that want to sell on this platform have to consider some fees and costs. They can vary depending on the type of products and volume of sales.
For one, retailers must pay a basic monthly fee of €99.90 (as of 06/24) regardless of the products sold.
In addition, there are different sales commissions for the various product categories. This ranges from 7% on electrical appliances to 22% on jewelry, with 13%-15% being the most common. The commission already includes a payment fee of 2.3%.
If you want to increase the visibility of your products on OTTO Market, you can buy advertisements from the managed service called OTTO Advertising. They will advise you, make you an offer, and afterwards give you a detailed reporting of how the advertisement performed.
What is OTTO Payment?
OTTO Payment acts as an intermediary between buyers and sellers on the marketplace. It ensures that payments are made securely and smoothly, enhancing the overall buying experience. As an integral part of the marketplace, OTTO Payment offers various payment options to meet the different needs of customers. From purchase on account to online payment services and other popular payment methods, OTTO Payment enables customers to pay in a familiar and convenient way.
The integration of OTTO Payment as a central payment service provider ensures that sellers receive their proceeds reliably and customers have a trustworthy platform for their purchases. This integration not only facilitates the buying process, but also creates a secure environment for transactions that strengthens customer trust.
In addition, the customer's risk of non-payment for partners is assumed by OTTO Payments.
Why should I use shopvibes for selling on OTTO Market?
Choosing the right tool for selling on OTTO Market can have a significant impact on the success of your e-commerce business. In this context, shopvibes offers a comprehensive solution aimed at an efficient and successful presence on the OTTO Marketplace.
One of the outstanding features of shopvibes is its ability to manage all relevant data and media in one central, digital location. This enables sellers to keep track of their product and media data and organize them efficiently. This enables collaboration across stakeholders and teams while maintaining consistent data quality.
The comprehensive nature of shopvibes is also reflected in the ability to manage not only product and media data, but also inventory and orders. In addition, synchronization with ERP systems enables smooth processing of your entire e-commerce operations.
shopvibes goes one step further by offering AI-powered content generation. This allows you to create engaging product descriptions with the click of a button, based on the existing data in the platform.
shopvibes also offers recommendations and data quality checks to further optimize your data for OTTO Market directly in the software. This ensures the highest data quality and the perfect presentation of your products on the OTTO marketplace.
To save time and minimize potential errors, the shopvibes software seamlessly transmits all required data to OTTO Market with just one click. The data is normalized to fit the requirements of OTTO Market automatically, so you don’t need to manually adjust your data or prepare the feed.
And the best: all of these features can be used not only for OTTO Market, but all your partners and channels! That means you only need to enter and optimize your data once and use it for any existing or new channel or partner. This makes shopvibes the most efficient and powerful solution for multi-channel commerce!
The references of customers who are already successfully using shopvibes underline the effectiveness of this solution. Their positive experiences confirm the performance and the added value we offer for sales.
Want to learn more about how shopvibes can help you maximize your success on OTTO Market? Click here!
Conclusion
OTTO Market offers a comprehensive e-commerce platform for companies that offers numerous advantages. Here, products can be presented to a broad online customer base. shopvibes helps you leverage this potential with a holistic and efficient solution that takes your products live in no time!
To learn more about shopvibes click here or send us an email.
About the author
Author
Philipp Schlieker
CTO & Co-Founder, shopvibes
Philipp Schlieker is the CTO and Co-Founder of Shopvibes and a recognized eCommerce technology expert. With extensive experience in building and scaling solutions for product data management, complex system integrations, and workflow optimization, Philipp shares practical insights and technical expertise to help eCommerce teams automate processes and unlock new revenue opportunities.
