Zalando selects AWS

Zalando has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider and is going all-in on AWS for machine learning, running all of its machine learning workloads on the world’s leading cloud. Zalando, which offers lifestyle and fashion products to more than 35 million customers across 17 countries, will use AWS’s machine learning services to innovate faster and offer a more personalized online shopping experience. In addition to machine learning, Zalando is using the breadth and depth of AWS technologies in analytics, compute, database, networking, serverless, storage, and more to transform the company into a more data-driven organization, optimizing critical business functions such as supply chain management, pricing, marketing, and customer care.

AWS’s machine learning services will enable Zalando to continuously improve the customer experience by reducing the time it takes to design, launch, and scale new features for its e-commerce platform. Using Amazon SageMaker to build, train and deploy machine learning models quickly, and Amazon EMR to capture, store, and analyze large volumes of data, Zalando’s engineering teams can use customer purchase data to create personalized shopping features like individual product and size recommendations and to predict a customer’s future outfit preferences. Zalando is also using AWS machine learning to offer more personalized recommendations based on style preferences or a brand’s ethical practices, predict when items are in-stock for more accurate package delivery and return times, and forecast real-time availability of the latest fashion trends. Working with AWS, Zalando can develop and implement new customer applications faster, such as creating digital avatars that allow customers to virtually try on clothes, and delivering a customer experience that enables shoppers to see which outfits fit them best without trying them on physically.

Zalando is using a wide portfolio of AWS services to drive operational efficiencies and track business performance in near real-time with data and insights. Zalando used AWS Lake Formation to create a data lake running on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to securely enable its developer teams to collaborate more effectively on projects across different service lines. In addition to its data lake, Zalando also combines data from its internal SAP workloads, including accounting, supply chain management, and e-commerce platforms, with AWS’s analytics portfolio, including AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Athena to produce transactional and analytical data reports that track business performance in real time. These insights help Zalando’s Size & Fit team to significantly reduce size-related returns by predicting how a garment’s fit is impacted by the material or stretch and making size recommendations that match the customer’s fit preferences. Additionally, by migrating its SAP workloads to AWS, Zalando has reduced IT management time by more than 30 percent.

“Working with AWS, we’ve created a next-generation machine learning platform that enables all of our data scientists and developers to collaborate better and work more efficiently with teams across the company,” said Rodrigue Schaefer, Vice President Digital Foundation at Zalando. “This platform is enabling us to continuously improve the customer experience by rapidly reducing the time it takes to design and implement state-of-the-art personalization tools and new product features. From better stock management to a quicker returns process, we’ve also used a range of additional AWS services to drive operational efficiencies at all stages of the customer journey.”

“As one of the largest online retailers in Germany and Europe, it is exciting to see Zalando go all-in on AWS for its machine learning provider to support their growth and innovation strategy. With millions of customers across Europe, Zalando is a great example of a company that is using machine learning to build, test, and introduce new and more personalized features at scale,” said Klaus Bürg, General Manager for Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. “By using the full portfolio of AWS in conjunction with machine learning, Zalando will become a more data-driven, flexible, and scalable organization that leverages customer insights to reimagine the online shopping experience.”