Kaufland: Marketplace of the Month for September

September is dedicated to Kaufland Global Marketplace, a platform that allows sellers to access, through a single registration, nine European marketplaces: Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. According to Kaufland, the network can offer sellers potential access to around 220 million online customers across Europe.

For a company looking to expand its international presence, Kaufland therefore represents not only an additional sales channel, but also a potential gateway to multiple European markets through a common structure.

The real challenge, however, begins after registration: correctly publishing the catalogue, adapting product data, keeping prices and availability up to date, importing orders and sending shipping and tracking information back to the marketplace.

It is precisely at this stage that integration with business systems becomes essential.

A single ecosystem for selling across multiple European markets

What you need to start selling on Kaufland

Kaufland specifies a number of basic requirements for seller registration. These include operating as a commercial business, being reachable by telephone and email, not selling products belonging to prohibited categories, and having an official EAN/GTIN for the products. The seller also remains responsible for shipping goods to the end customer.

These requirements are accompanied by the tax, environmental and regulatory obligations specific to the markets in which the seller intends to operate. Rules relating, for example, to Extended Producer Responsibility may vary from country to country and depending on the product category.

From your company catalogue to the Kaufland catalogue

One of the most important aspects of a marketplace project is the quality of product data. The information available in your eCommerce platform, ERP or business management system is not necessarily already organised according to the structure required by the marketplace.

To publish a product correctly, you need to manage information such as:

Title

Description

Images

Identifier

Category

Attributes

Variants

Price

Availability

Shipping
information

It is not simply a matter of translating a description: categories, attributes and commercial information may require specific adaptations for the target market.

Kaufland allows product data to be entered in the local language and offer data in the currency required by the relevant sales channel.

Categories, attributes and variants

The same product may be represented differently in company systems and on the marketplace. An ERP system, for example, may use an internal classification that does not correspond to Kaufland's category structure.

In an integrated process, the data therefore needs to be transformed:

This process may include:

Category
mapping

Attribute
mapping

Variant
management

Value
normalisation

Information
transformation

Required data
validation

Different prices for different markets

Selling the same product in several countries does not necessarily mean using the same price.

The strategy may vary depending on:

An integration allows you to start from the price stored in your business system and apply specific rules for each market.

For example:

This allows the seller to maintain a centralised pricing logic without having to manually update thousands of offers.

Availability always kept in sync

Stock management becomes even more important when the same product is sold simultaneously through an eCommerce website, on Kaufland and on other marketplaces.

Outdated availability can result in sales of products that are already out of stock, order cancellations and additional work for customer service.

With an integrated process, availability from the central system can be automatically synchronised with Kaufland.

The flow can become:

while simultaneously updating the other sales channels as well.

This helps maintain a consistent view of available stock.

Orders need to flow back into your business systems

Integration does not end with catalogue publication. When an order is received, it needs to be transferred to the system used by the company for operational management.

A typical flow might be:

The order can then enter the same process already used for the other sales channels:

Acquisition

Availability
check

Preparation

Shipping

Tracking
generation

Marketplace
status update

Shipping and tracking

Kaufland provides sellers with the information required for shipping, while the seller remains responsible for sending the goods to the end customer.

Once the shipment has been prepared, the information needs to be sent back to the marketplace.

With bindCommerce, the flow can be integrated to transmit:

Kaufland and bindCommerce: an integrated flow

bindCommerce allows Kaufland Global Marketplace to be connected to the systems already used by the company.

The architecture can be represented simply as:

and, for orders:

The objective is not to replace existing systems, but to make them communicate with each other.
Through bindCommerce, it is possible to centralise and automate:

This becomes particularly useful when a company sells simultaneously on several marketplaces or manages catalogues containing large numbers of products and frequent updates.

A European marketplace, a multichannel approach

Opening a new marketplace creates new opportunities, but it also introduces new processes to manage.

When volumes are limited, many activities can be carried out manually. However, as the number of products, markets and orders increases, keeping separate processes can become inefficient.

Integration instead allows business systems to remain the main point of reference, while bindCommerce transfers and transforms the information required by Kaufland.

The result is a process in which commercial expansion does not necessarily translate into a proportional increase in manual activities.