In 2021, Amazon now has nearly 20 marketplaces to choose from. It’s no surprise that many Amazon Sellers choose to expand the pie! If you’ve got a big store and you’re still selling on Amazon US, why not take a leap over the pond?
With the right tools and resources at your disposal, selling on Amazon EU is easy. Keep reading for a quick guide to rapid expansion…
So where are all of Amazon’s marketplaces? Right now, Amazon groups their marketplaces into 4 regions:
Most Amazon Sellers tend to expand further within the same region. For example, Amazon US sellers tend to expand to Canada or Mexico. This is actually called a unified account, but a unified account only goes so far. Compared to the 3.1 billion that frequent Amazon.com US, Amazon.ca, and .mx have barely 300 million visitors.
For a proper expansion of your business, you should turn your eyes towards Amazon Europe.
The first reason is a no-brainer; Amazon EU sellers can sell in 8 countries with one unified account! After Amazon.com, Amazon.eu is Amazon’s next biggest selling region, and it’s still growing. In 2020, two new marketplaces - Poland and Sweden were launched, leading to 17% further growth in Amazon EU’s global market share.
With about 500 million in traffic, it's still small compared to Amazon US, but it’s still a far cry bigger than the rest of the Amazon marketplaces. Most importantly, though, it’s very easy to expand to Amazon EU!
One way to do this is through AGS, short for Amazon Global Selling.
Due to its vast international network, Amazon provides a program called Amazon Global Selling or AGS for short. Sellers who sign up for AGS can list and sell their products all over the world. It’s very straightforward; all you need to do is go to the AGS webpage and click “Expand internationally”
This will direct you to a very intuitive and simple dashboard that tells you the requirements for every single region.
The best part of being in the AGS program is that you can unify all your accounts into one single Global Account. This means if you sell in the Americas, Europe, and even the Asia Pacific, you can unify all of those under one account.
This is by far the fastest way to expand to Amazon EU that we know of!
Once you’ve followed all the steps on the dashboard we mentioned earlier, you can start selling on Amazon EU. Before you jump in, though, there are some important aspects of selling on Amazon EU that sellers should be aware of:
Amazon EU has some tax regulations that US sellers are not used to. You have to register for the VAT tax in Europe because it is a regulatory requirement. Once you do it, though, you can sell freely across every Amazon EU marketplace. You will also have to complete two seller identification checks, one is just a basic KYC, and the other is when you surpass €15000 in sales.
VAT regulations can be difficult to navigate, and a lot of sellers let it deter them from expanding to Amazon EU markets. Don’t let it stop you! SimplyVAT can fully handle your tax registration and help you with any issues that may arise.
For more information about the current EU VAT rules, download SimplyVAT's free eBook that unpacks the regulations and it's implications for international ecommerce businesses.
EU VAT registration shouldn’t be what stands between you and a seven-figure business that encompasses two major selling regions!
When it comes to managing inventory and fulfilling orders in the EU, sellers actually have 3 different options:
Pan-European FBA - Your products are stored in fulfilment centres all over Europe, and you pay standard local FBA fees for each marketplace
European Fulfilment Network - Your products are stored in the UK inventory pool. To fulfil orders in other European markets, you must pay a cross-border fee
Multi-Country Inventory - You can send your inventory to fulfilment centres in multiple European countries for faster delivery locally (but you may be charged additional VAT)
Based on those three options, Amazon Sellers can decide which works best for them. Pan-European FBA is the most cost-effective option, but the other options may also work well depending on your business.
So you’ve decided to expand to Amazon EU. Congrats! The road is sure to be fulfilling, but if you’re an Amazon Seller, you already know it won’t be easy.
You’ll need to track your sales across both Amazon US and Amazon EU’s many marketplaces. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t really provide a unified dashboard for this. You can only see sales, profits and reports when you click into a particular region, and again, ONLY for that region.
For this reason, we recommend investing in Profit Tracking Tools that consolidate all your marketplace data in one place.
Another task that may begin to seem insurmountable is managing Amazon Advertising for multiple marketplaces!
The elephant in the room is obvious… You can’t just copy and paste your ad campaigns across regions! Not only do your keywords need to be translated into a totally new language for some EU marketplaces, but the audience behaviour and keyword search volumes are very different.
Managing Amazon PPC for one marketplace is hard enough; adding more to the mix means an insane increase in man-hours! That’s why, when it comes to managing Amazon PPC ad campaigns for multiple marketplaces, we highly recommend using Amazon PPC Software.
All in all, expanding to overseas Amazon marketplaces may seem like a daunting task, but if done successfully, you can have a six or seven-figure business. The key to managing an expanding business is having the right tools at your disposal. We hope you find this article helpful for your future endeavours on Amazon!
