Zalando wants to be Europe's platform. Not just its shop.

Platform businesses do not happen by accident. They happen when a company decides, at a point of genuine choice, to stop competing on what it sells and start competing on what it enables.

Zalando has been making that decision in stages for several years. But the version of it on display at Shoptalk Europe 2026 was the most direct articulation yet, delivered by Co-CEO David Schröder on the main stage in Barcelona. The company that started by selling flip flops from an apartment in Berlin now operates 14 logistics sites across nine European countries, runs infrastructure for Next, Marks and Spencer, and AWWG, and has just announced a recommerce partnership with Zara. It is not primarily trying to win a transaction on its own platform. It is trying to become the underlying layer through which European retail scales.

That is either a very bold strategy or a very obvious one, depending on how you read the next five years of digital commerce in Europe.

The return of the startup mindset

Schröder framed the current moment with a useful piece of self-awareness. He expected, when he became co-CEO two years ago, that the wildest years were behind the company. The early hyper-growth, the mobile transition, the surge of internationalisation; he assumed the level of disruption those moments required would not return. He was wrong.

“The last three years have really taught me that not only do we have a very dynamic industry landscape, with macro shocks and geopolitical events shaping the consumer environment, but we now have another major technology shift as well,” he said. His conclusion: go back to what Zalando did in the early days. Be entrepreneurs again.

That framing matters because it signals something about how Zalando is approaching the AI moment. Not as a feature to be bolted on, not as an efficiency play to be managed, but as a structural redesign of the consumer experience.

Shopping should not feel like a warehouse

The clearest articulation of Zalando’s AI direction came from a simple observation: online shopping has always asked the consumer to adapt to the machine. Keyword search logic. Category navigation trees. Interfaces designed around database structures rather than human behaviour.

Schröder’s argument is that AI finally gives Zalando the tool to reverse that dynamic. The company’s conversational assistant saw 6 million users in the whole of last year. In the first quarter of this year alone, it was 10 million. Users are asking three to five questions per session, not typing a keyword and scrolling results. They are telling the assistant where they are going on holiday, what event they need to dress for, what they last bought that did not fit. The context is richer, the dialogue is more human, and the matching is correspondingly more precise.

The infrastructure numbers support the ambition. Ninety percent of the content served on Zalando is now AI-generated; a year ago, that figure was near zero. AI-based size recommendations have already reduced returns by 8% in the past year, translating to several million fewer returns annually.

For marketers, the signal is worth sitting with. A consumer who has a 10-minute conversation with an AI assistant before making a purchase is not a consumer who can be easily intercepted at the last click. The discovery and consideration journey is shifting deeper into a closed dialogue, and the brands that are embedded in that assistant’s recommendations will have a structural advantage over those who are not.

The platform play and what it means for brands across Europe

The more strategically significant part of the session was Schröder’s description of what Zalando is doing with its infrastructure. The company is not just building a better app. It is opening its logistics network, its technology platform, and now its recommerce capability to other brands and retailers across Europe.

The Next example is the most concrete proof point: within a single year of using Zalando’s European logistics infrastructure, Next saw sales increase 33% and costs fall almost 10%. That outcome is attributable, in Schröder’s telling, to the friction that still exists in European cross-border commerce. Different regulatory frameworks, different local delivery networks, different customs dynamics. Zalando has built the infrastructure to navigate all of that across 29 markets, and it is now effectively licensing that capability.

The Scayle dimension of the About You acquisition points in the same direction. About You had built a software platform, Scayle, that underlies not just About You but a number of other European commerce businesses. Zalando now controls that platform and is taking it into the US market. The company is beginning to look less like a retailer that built technology and more like a technology business that happens to operate a consumer-facing retail proposition.

Europe’s technology gap is the harder problem

Schröder did not shy away from the structural challenge sitting behind all of this. His concern about AI is not operational; it is geopolitical. The foundational models powering the AI moment originate in the US or China. Europe has produced great research talent; DeepMind, now at the heart of Google’s Gemini, was built by researchers largely from Europe. But the continent has not produced the conditions for productising and scaling that talent into globally competitive models.

His prescription was direct: easier company formation through something like the EU Inc framework, better funding networks in the critical phases of a company’s development, and political will to support European champions without regard for national origin. The observation that Europe is still debating which country builds which plane, when the technology competition with the US and China is escalating, was pointed.

What this means for senior marketers

The session carried a message that sits outside the usual conversation about channel strategy or consumer engagement. Zalando is building infrastructure, and the question for any brand operating in European markets is whether it wants to be on that infrastructure or competing against it.

The agentic commerce model Schröder described, where AI conducts deep, personalised conversations with consumers before purchase, will reshape where and how discovery happens. The brands embedded in Zalando’s ecosystem, through its apps, its logistics network, or the Scayle software platform, will have access to a layer of consumer intelligence and infrastructure that would take most individual brands a decade to build independently.

The companies that understand this are not the ones asking how to optimise their presence on Zalando’s current platform. They are the ones asking whether the infrastructure Zalando is building is where the next decade of European digital commerce is going to run.