selling on Amazon.de and fr - Whats the story ?

Hi,

We are just setting up in Germany and France at the moment as well, but I would not consider doing it any other way than using an Amazon Europe Marketplaces account, in conjunction with the Amazon European Fulfillment Network, as all you have to do is send your product into an Amazon fulfilment centre in the UK and Amazon basically take care of everything for you. Of course it is dependent on your margins, but keep in mind their charges include fulfilment costs, free shipping and customer service, returns the works and they put your money into your bank account every two weeks.

As you can see below we live in New Zealand, but we contract manufacture in Wales, where we are selling exclusively on Amazon and are selling into UK and Europe like this. In addition we are also shipping product to Amazon in the United States, using Amazon’s recommended freight forwarders, where we are doing exactly the same thing with Amazon over there.

Quite honestly these initiatives put in by Amazon have to be the panacea for every small business wanting to expand sales internationally. My recommendation would be get into it ASAP.

-Peter

Hi,

We sold quite a lot of stock on Amazon.fr & Amazon.de in particular. For a while it accounted for around 20% of our orders. We used a mixture of mainly self-fulfilment and FBA on some lines.

Our experience in a word – difficult

We deliberately chose not to use the European Marketplaces Account. Amazon goes to great lengths to promote this but like Matt said somewhere, we were wary about combining everything in to one. We knew that if there were issues with the EU side of things, we didn’t want it to potentially negatively affect our domestic performance/metrics. I am glad we did.

FBA is okay for some items however many of the products we were selling simply were not feasible due to the FBA costs. They are higher in EU than in UK at least for the small, lightweight items we were selling. It would have left us with no margin. So we used self-fulfillment. The main issue is delivery lead-times and non-receipts. This caused us quite a large administrative burden dealing with enquiries of course in German & French. Yes we used Google Chrome etc. but it is still more laborious than dealing with native speakers – especially when things go wrong.

Go wrong they did. A sack of mail was lost that was destined for the EU. You can imagine the issues this caused. However, we found generally that delivery times varied enormously and seemingly without any pattern. Also some of our more expensive items we were sending International SIgned For (ISF). In Germany, we found many customers use post boxes (can’t remember the term) where they go and collect orders when it is convenient (a bit like the boxes/lockers that Amazon are going to trial in the UK). One problem, they can’t accept signed for items. So ISF items were getting returned to us as undeliverable.

As time passed our feedback really started to suffer with policy violations predictably following. We responded to these with our action plan for improvement and the amber warnings were lifted from our German & French accounts. However, the Euro to Pound exchange rate gradually deteriorated and with it our margins. The exchange rate that Amazon EU uses is even less favourable due to their commissions and in the end it just simply didn’t stack up for us. We called it a day on our German & French operations and instead decided to concentrate the time domestically. The accounts are still there but we have cancelled our Pro subscriptions.

We don’t regret it. Amazon make a really big deal about trading across borders. We haven’t completely given up on this and plan to structure things in a different way next time we attempt it. Unless you are able to use FBA exclusively expect unforeseen problems. In a nutshell we would summarize these as the following and this is not an exhaustive list:

Unpredictable delivery lead-times
Language issues
Exchange-rate variations
VAT bomb that Matt has covered
Different consumer legislation e.g. DSR in Germany – the retailer is required to pay for return p&p costs also
Different customer expectations and culture

Our advice is tread carefully as it is potentially a steep learning curve and we consider ourselves as very knowledgable about Amazon. I am the first to admit however that I underestimated the pitfalls. Would we go back – yes but we will do it differently!

Steve :)