Zalando Reduced Account Abuse and Commerce Friction

Zalando, a powerhouse in European online retail, connects millions of customers, brands, and partners across 25 countries. From its humble beginnings as a Berlin-based online shoe store in 2008, it has evolved into Europe’s go-to platform for fashion and lifestyle, serving more than 50 million active users. But with great success comes great attention — especially from malicious actors. To effectively identify and protect against cyberattacks in an ever-evolving threat landscape without disrupting the customer experience, it turned to trusted partner Akamai.

As sophisticated attacks such as account abuse become increasingly complex and harder to detect, they potentially impact legitimate Zalando customers and their shopping experiences. Since these sophisticated methods pose a significant threat — especially during sales of exclusive items — Zalando sought to further strengthen its defenses. In line with its broader strategy of combining its infrastructure and tools with market solutions, Zalando tasked its team of infrastructure experts with evaluating potential technologies and implementing the one that best fit the company’s needs.

The team concluded that to address these challenges, Zalando should deepen its partnership with Akamai by integrating Account Protector into its security ecosystem. ​​“We thought about building our own tools, but it’s tough to justify that when you can leverage a proven solution from a trusted partner,” said a principal engineer at Zalando.

Account Protector offers user risk assessment based on 50+ indicators and a nuanced approach to security. By integrating this Akamai solution with its existing infrastructure, Zalando can utilize comprehensive risk scoring alongside its current bot detection measures.

By leveraging Akamai Account Protector, Zalando successfully strengthened its defenses while ensuring an unbeatable shopping experience. The implementation yielded impressive results: Zalando’s threat detection accuracy improved in distinguishing between malicious actors and genuine customers. This was a win-win for Zalando: a frictionless journey for genuine customers and a strong barrier against malicious bots.

Beyond improved detection, Account Protector provided Zalando with deeper insights into user behavior patterns. This understanding enabled more informed security decisions and better resolution of individual customer cases. Due to the solution’s flexibility, Zalando can move away from binary allow/deny decisions, instead tailoring security measures based on comprehensive risk assessments.

As one of Europe’s most data-driven companies, Zalando knows the value of smart insights. “We’ve always prioritized blending data from various sources to fuel our decision-making. Adding intelligence from Akamai has been key to evolving our cybersecurity strategy and ensuring a great shopping experience,” concluded an engineering manager from Zalando.

Founded in Berlin in 2008, Zalando is building the leading pan-European ecosystem for fashion and lifestyle e-commerce around two growth vectors: Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B). In B2C, we offer an inspiring and quality multi-brand shopping experience for fashion and lifestyle products to about 50 million active customers in 25 markets. In B2B, we are using our logistic infrastructure, software and service capabilities to help brands and retailers run and scale their entire e-commerce business, on or off Zalando. As an ecosystem, Zalando aims to enable positive change for the fashion and lifestyle industry.