OTTO Market: dane produktu, opis, selling points

Who can sell on OTTO Market

OTTO Market is not open to everyone. According to OTTO’s formal requirements, your company must have its registered seat in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, France or Denmark, in one of the legal forms OTTO lists for that country (for Germany e.g. GmbH, UG (haftungsbeschränkt), AG, KG, OHG), with its own VAT ID from that country.

• Small businesses under § 19 UStG (Kleinunternehmer) and all legal forms not on OTTO’s list are excluded.
• Companies in a VAT group sharing one VAT ID (Organschaft) cannot be connected.
• Partners from the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, France and Denmark take part in the OSS procedure with the VAT ID of their home country.
• Every partner accepts OTTO’s Business Partner Declaration on Sustainability — for example, no PVC in packaging and textiles and no real fur.

How OTTO structures product data

You manage products in the partner portal (Partner Connect), through an integrator or through the OTTO Market Products API (v5). The unit OTTO sells is the variation (SKU); a productReference groups the variations of one product, such as sizes and colours.

sku

your identifier for the variation, max. 50 characters, unique

productReference

groups variations into one product, max. 50 characters, not shown to buyers

ean

mandatory, unique in your assortment, must not start with 2

category

from OTTO’s category list, the same for all variations

brandId

from OTTO’s brand list, the same for all variations

productLine

the product’s own name or model (e.g. “501”), max. 70 characters

compliance

mandatory: product safety addresses (or food information)

Several partners can sell the same product: OTTO assigns an ID (MOIN) to a variation with its content, and other partners confirm that content to go live with their own offer. That is one more reason to keep content factual and free of anything that only applies to your offer.

No title field: what you control instead

The OTTO Products API has fields for category, brand and product line, but no free-text title. The product name on otto.de is assembled from these data, so the levers are: the right category, the brand from OTTO’s brand list and a clean product line name.

Keywords stuffed into the product line repeat what category and brand already say and make the name unreadable. Search terms belong in correct attributes, which OTTO uses for filters and navigation.

Description and selling points

OTTO’s API describes the description as relevant for SEO and asks for less than 2,000 characters. HTML is accepted but limited to a list of tags; everything else is removed: formatting such as b, strong, i, em, u, sub, sup and span, and blocks such as p, div, h1–h6, ul, ol, li and blockquote. OTTO notes that allowed tags are not guaranteed to display as intended, so keep to paragraphs, a list and bold sparingly.

Selling points (bulletPoints) are short statements of 3–180 characters each. Integration guides such as Tradebyte’s work with one to five and recommend product features, not default properties, written as short phrases rather than full sentences.

Prices, delivery times and your contact details have their own fields and your legal information — in a product text they are out of place and wrong as soon as anything changes. Generic environmental claims have been banned in Germany since 27 September 2026; see green claims ban. The unit price is not text either: the pricing block has its own field (normPriceInfo, e.g. sales unit 500 g, reference unit 1 kg); the German rules are in unit price in Germany.

Attributes and images

Attributes are name–value pairs validated against OTTO’s attribute definitions for your category. Each definition states the unit to use (e.g. “cm”), whether several values are allowed, sometimes a closed list of allowed values and a list of recommended values “to get full navigation and filter features on otto.de”. Some requirements are conditional: if you send a sustainability seal such as Organic Content Standard 100, the licence number becomes mandatory. Attributes OTTO does not define can be sent as additional attributes.

Images

at least one of type IMAGE, no upper limit in the API

Format

JPG or PNG, RGB colour space

Size

OTTO’s API: minimum 500 x 1,000 pixels, maximum width 4,500 pixels

Other media types

energy efficiency label, product data sheet, safety data sheet, warning label, user manual, assembly instructions and more

GPSR addresses and energy label

Since 13 December 2024, every online offer must name the manufacturer, the EU responsible person where the manufacturer is outside the EU, product identifiers and warnings (Regulation (EU) 2023/988, Article 19). At OTTO the compliance block is mandatory for every variation.

name

company name, max. 100 characters

address

street, postcode, town, country in one line, max. 200 characters

regionCode

country code (ISO 3166 alpha-2), e.g. DE

email or url

one of them is mandatory

phone

optional, max. 20 characters

roles

MANUFACTURER and/or DISTRIBUTOR — at least one DISTRIBUTOR address is required

Warnings and safety information belong on the product in German; OTTO offers media types such as WARNING_LABEL and SAFETY_DATASHEET for them. For energy-labelled products (TVs, fridges, lamps…), the label and the product information sheet are uploaded as media of the types ENERGY_EFFICIENCY_LABEL and PRODUCT_DATASHEET, and the energy efficiency class is an attribute; which media are mandatory is part of the category definition. What the law requires online is in energy label online and GPSR in online listings; the GPSR generator writes the safety block.

Check your listing

Paste your OTTO description and selling points into the free listing check: it finds promotional wording, contact details, banned environmental claims and “CE-geprüft”. Nordova writes OTTO content in a calm catalogue voice from your product data only, with the selling points in a separate field.