Methodology
& Scope

Brand Partner Index tracks the experience of European fashion brands across the major e-commerce platforms. The initial universe is drawn from brands listed in the partner programmes of Zalando, ASOS, About You, Amazon Fashion, Zalando Lounge, and adjacent marketplaces. Each issue reports against these platforms by name and accepts open reference to any additional platform a respondent chooses to mention.

The target respondent is a brand owner, channel manager, or merchandising lead — the person who makes day-to-day decisions about which platforms a brand sells through. Enterprise retail groups are excluded; the Index is oriented toward independent and mid-market European fashion brands.

Each respondent is asked the same eight questions, in the same order, in every issue. Questions are open-ended and conversational; structured signals are extracted from the recorded transcripts by a downstream coding layer operating on the aggregate. Open-ended phrasing avoids mid-sentence numerical commitment and tends to produce richer qualitative texture than scaled instruments at comparable response rates.

1. Q.1

   Landscape

   Which major platforms does the brand currently sell through?

2. Q.2

   Comparative

   How does the day-to-day experience of working with a given platform compare to the others in the respondent’s channel mix — better or worse, and on which dimensions?

3. Q.3

   Trajectory

   Over the past twelve to twenty-four months, has the relationship with the platform improved, worsened, or remained broadly the same? What has changed?

4. Q.4

   Friction

   What is the single most significant point of friction the respondent has experienced with the platform in the last year?

5. Q.5

   Strength

   What does the platform do measurably better than its competitors, as observed from the supply side?

6. Q.6

   Peer Recommendation

   If a fellow brand owner were entering the European market for the first time, which platform would the respondent recommend as the entry channel, and for what reason?

7. Q.7

   Forward Commitment

   Over the coming twelve months, does the respondent intend to increase, hold, or decrease investment in the platform, or potentially exit the channel?

8. Q.8

   Five-Year Outlook

   Which European e-commerce platform does the respondent expect to be dominant for fashion brands five years from now, and on what basis?

The instrument is held stable across issues to enable longitudinal comparison. Where wording must be refined, the change is recorded in the revision history at the foot of this document and reported in the affected issue.

• Aggregation
  All responses are reported in aggregate. No individual brand, person, or organisation is ever identified in a published figure.
• Cell size
  Published figures require a minimum of fifty respondents per cell in the standard case. See § 7 for the preview-issue exception.
• Quotation
  Direct quotations from respondents are reproduced only with explicit, individual consent, and are never attributed.
• Raw data
  Raw transcripts, call recordings, and respondent identifiers are not shared, sold, licensed, or otherwise disclosed to any platform, retailer, vendor, or third party.
• Withdrawal
  Respondents may withdraw a response, in whole or in part, at any time prior to the publication of the issue in which it appears.

Panels are recruited from publicly available brand directories of the participating platforms. Contact information is drawn from legally-required disclosures — Impressum pages and equivalent commercial registers — and from open business listings.

Participation is voluntary. Respondents are not compensated in cash or in kind beyond receiving the aggregated issue at no cost upon publication. Interviews are conducted by telephone by a trained interviewer, with an AI note-taking system assisting the interviewer. Respondents are informed of the AI’s role in the opening sentence of the call and may decline at that point or any subsequent point.

Typical interview duration is approximately eight minutes. Sample composition — respondents broken down by country, brand size, and product category — is reported in full alongside every published issue.

Brand Partner Index publishes quarterly. Each issue is accompanied by a sample-composition table, a margin-of-error figure for each published metric, and the full revision history of the instrument.

Issues are available to the general public at brandpartnerindex.com. Every participating brand receives the aggregated issue at no cost at the time of publication, as the single form of reciprocity offered for participation.

Brand Partner Index is not affiliated with any platform, marketplace, retailer, or retail group. No platform or marketplace holds any editorial, financial, or operational interest in the Index and none will be given advance access to individual respondent data.

The Index is financed through the licensing of aggregated findings to researchers, analysts, and industry observers. Individual-level data is never sold, licensed, or otherwise transferred to any party.