But where are the limits of Long Tail? What about the competition with the own product line? At a roundtable discussion with Zalando, Real digital, K-Mail-Order and Tradebyte on this year’s ECD, Blogger and writer Stephan Meixner of neuhandeln.de wanted to know more about the risks and chances of trading with external product ranges.

Zalando prefers to be the “host of a party” and wants to extend its shop by integrating external product lines. For food retailer Real drop-shipping is a very promising possibility to round off its own range for the benefit of its customers. But the panelists also agreed on the difficulties when it comes to the integration of external product ranges, for instance when partners do not follow the guidelines consistently. After all the customers don’t know if they are buying directly from the shop retailer or from a third party.