Selling On Amazon EU - The Opportunity

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Amazon.com - A Changing Landscape For Sellers

Amazon.com offers excellent sales potential for sellers. However, it's a much more competitive marketplace than even a year or two ago, with almost 3,000 new sellers signing up with Amazon EVERY DAY!

Innovation and diversification are the keys to growth for today's Amazon Seller.

To ensure continued growth and lower business risk, sellers must look outside Amazon.com.

This can include launching on other platforms in the US, including Ebay, Walmart and Jet.

Another option is developing your own ecommerce site.

However, the focus of this post is on international expansion, and specifically, Amazon Europe (EU).

Why Amazon EU?

Amazon has 10 marketplaces outside of the US – Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, India, China and Japan.

So, why is Europe the first step for international expansion?

It's the next biggest Amazon marketplace after North America, thus offering the largest sales potential.
Excellent sales growth in recent years.
You’ll be able to list your products on 5 marketplaces (UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain) and ship to customers in 26 countries around Europe.
The market potential is also significant - Europe has a population of over 500 million.
Competition is also much lower on Amazon Europe, compared to the US. There are far fewer sellers, and products tend to have much lower numbers of product reviews.

Sellers who expand to Europe currently have a great opportunity to gain a large market share there, which can reap rewards for many years to come.

The Big 5 Marketplaces Of Amazon Europe

Size

Using website visits in November 2017 as a proxy for size, we can see that Germany and the UK are the biggest marketplaces in Amazon Europe.

Amazon Germany is actually bigger than the UK, which is often a surprise to many US sellers.

While the other three marketplaces (France, Italy and Spain) are much smaller, together they are approximately the same size as the UK.

Competition

Competition in France, Italy and Spain is generally much lower than Germany and the UK. This is evident by fewer sellers, lower numbers of product reviews and generally lower costs for pay per click advertising (PPC).

This can mitigate the fact that Amazon France, Italy and Spain are smaller, as success in these 3 marketplaces is often easier to attain.

We have firsthand experience of this, having optimized listings for a number of sellers who have found their greatest success on Amazon France and Italy.

Interestingly, this data suggests that Germany is a more attractive proposition than the UK. It is less competitive than the UK (based on the number of sellers), and is also a bigger marketplace (as we saw earlier).

One imagines this is primarily due to the language barrier, which prevents many US and UK Sellers from expanding to non-English speaking marketplaces like Germany.

However, the language barrier is actually an opportunity, as many sellers don't do a good job at translating and adapting their product listings to non-English speaking marketplaces.

Sales growth

With respect to e-commerce sales growth in these 5 marketplaces, the graphic below looks at the period of 2012 to 2016.

We see excellent sales growth in e-commerce across each country. However, Germany, France and Italy stand out, with growth rates of over 90%!

This confirms the excellent opportunity offered to sellers who expand to Amazon Germany, while we can see a very bright future for Amazon France and Italy.

This is also backed up by a considerable population in these countries - Germany (82 million), France (65 million) and Italy (60 million).

Next Steps

Interested in expanding to Amazon EU? We provide an all-in-one turnkey service for sellers expanding to Amazon EU, including VAT and translations.

Not yet sure if Europe is right for you? Sign up for our free e-course. It will tell you all about Amazon EU and how to assess the sales potential for your products there.

If you have any questions, you can leave a comment below. Please share this post if you like it too!

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