Zalando
Designated in the first round and the first company to challenge its designation in court.
- Tier
- VLOP — very large online platform
- Provider
- Zalando SE
- Sector
- Marketplace
- Designated
- 25 April 2023
- Obligations from
- 25 August 2023
- EU users at designation
- 74.5 million retail; 26.8 million third-party
- Formal proceedings
- None to date
- Court challenges
- T-348/23
Designated 25 April 2023 on 74.5 million average monthly active recipients for its retail offering and 26.8 million for its third-party marketplace.
Zalando brought the first annulment action against a DSA designation decision, arguing that its own-retail users should not count towards the platform threshold because that part of the business does not disseminate third-party content. The split figures above are the reason the case exists.
Where Zalando sits in the tier
Designation is not a ranking, and the obligations do not scale with size: the smallest designated service carries exactly the same duties in Articles 33 to 43 as the largest.
Marketplace duties stack underneath the designated tier
A platform that lets consumers conclude distance contracts with traders carries Section 4 of Chapter III on top of everything designation adds. Article 30 is a know-your-business-customer rule: before a trader can offer anything, the marketplace must collect name, contact details, payment account, and trade register information, and make best efforts to assess whether that information is reliable and complete.
Article 31 requires compliance by design — the interface must be built so traders can actually meet their own legal obligations. Article 32 is the right to information: where the provider learns an illegal product was offered, it must tell affected consumers who bought it in the preceding six months, identify the trader, and set out the means of redress.
This is where enforcement against marketplaces has concentrated. Every marketplace proceeding opened to date pairs an allegation about illegal products with an allegation about the systems meant to keep them off the service.
- Article 30
- Trader traceability, with a Commission-run database of trader information under Article 32(3).
- Article 28
- Protection of minors, where the marketplace is accessible to them.
Before the courts
Zalando v Commission — challenge to VLOP designation
Zalando brought the first annulment action against a designation decision. Its argument went to the heart of how Article 33 counts: the DSA applies to intermediary services, and in its own-retail business Zalando is not an intermediary at all. Counting those customers towards average monthly active recipients, it said, inflated the figure past a threshold it would not otherwise have crossed.
The General Court dismissed the action on 3 September 2025. The decisive problem was evidential rather than conceptual — Zalando could not effectively separate users who had been exposed to third-party seller content from those who had not, on a service where both offerings sit in one interface.
The judgment affirmed the Commission’s use of average monthly active recipients as the designation metric, which is why it matters well beyond Zalando. It is the reason the split figures reported at designation — retail and third-party counted separately — exist in the record at all.
Zalando has appealed to the Court of Justice in Case C-724/25 P, filed on 13 November 2025.
Zalando timeline
- 25 April 2023 Designated a VLOP by Commission decision.
- 25 August 2023 Articles 33 to 43 begin to apply, four months after notification.
- 3 September 2025 General Court judgment in T-348/23: dismissed.
What Zalando has to do
Designation applies the asymmetric obligations in Articles 33 to 43. They are the same for every designated service, read against a platform surface. Terms used on this page are collected in the glossary.
- Article 34 Systemic risk assessment
- Article 35 Mitigation of risks
- Article 37 Independent audit
- Article 38 Recommender systems without profiling
- Article 39 Advertising repository
- Article 40 Data access for the Commission and vetted researchers
- Article 41 Internal compliance function
- Article 42 Transparency reporting
- Article 43 Supervisory fee
Related designations
Other marketplace services in the tier: Amazon Store, Shein, AliExpress, Temu, Google Shopping.
Designated on the same day (25 April 2023): Google Search, Bing, YouTube, Google Play, Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Store, Wikipedia, TikTok, Pinterest, App Store, X, AliExpress, Snapchat, Google Shopping, LinkedIn, Booking.com.