Most Amazon sellers spend a lot of time trying to crack one main question: how can you sell more on the platform? It’s a question with a number of valid answers. Expanding your reach internationally is one worth considering.
As of 2022, Amazon has 21 marketplaces around the world—from Europe to Asia, to the Middle East, and beyond. One of the most logical ways to sell more is by opening up your business to a larger customer base. Amazon Global Selling makes that possible.
Selling globally presents some unique complications. But for many Amazon sellers, the benefits make them well worthwhile. Amazon Global Selling is compelling for a few main reasons.
When you’re only selling on the US version of the Amazon marketplace, your products will only show up for the people searching Amazon.com. That’s a big number, to be sure. Statista estimates that Amazon has 112 million Prime subscribers in the US alone. Yet it only represents a portion of your possible customer base on the Amazon marketplace.
The company boasts over 150 million global Prime members, and 300 million active customer accounts worldwide. That translates to a sizable boost in the number of consumers that will see and consider your products if you start using Amazon Global Selling.
If you sell bathing suits or heavy winter coats, half of the year can seem useless for pushing those products. In the US, no one’s going swimming in December, and most consumers aren’t thinking about new coats in July.
By expanding your business to a global audience, seasonal items have value year-round. When your US customers are buying coats, customers in Australia or Brazil will be interested in bathing suits. And you can start tapping into the varying holiday seasons people celebrate in different cultures. You can make product lines go further and keep their value longer.
Even if all that sounds nice, you’re probably thinking about what a pain international shipping can be. It tends to be expensive and slow, and you may hit up against local customs. Is selling globally on Amazon really worth all that trouble?
If you already have an FBA account, you can take advantage of the international fulfillment services the company offers. As with domestic FBA orders, you simply ship your items to Amazon’s global fulfillment centers, and they take it from there.
Learn more about Amazon FBA and how to meet customs requirements, manage international freight, and resolve stuck shipments from the experts at Zee.
If you opt to use FBA for your global selling, then a lot of the differences in managing domestic and international orders will be taken care of by Amazon. But you still have a few main considerations to take into account before deciding whether to sign on for Amazon Global Selling.
Each country you sell in will have its own laws and tax requirements. You need to be prepared to comply with all of them. Do your research in advance to understand what taxes you’ll be expected to cover, so you can price your products accordingly.
Don't forget to look into local regulations. Some countries have restrictions on the types of products you can sell. Others have requirements for sellers, such as establishing a local business address for return shipments or going through a seller identity verification process.
Expanding into a country where the primary language is different from your own presents obvious complications. You need to be able to create a version of the product page for every item you sell in the language of each country you expand into. You’ll want to do country-specific research to make sure you understand the basics about the area’s culture, so you don’t commit any offensive or embarrassing faux pas in your marketing.
And unless you use FBA for all international orders, you’ll need to be able to provide customer support for each marketplace you join, which means having someone on your team that speaks the language of each place.
Pricing your products across different countries isn’t straightforward. To start, you have to think about currency conversions. Not only does the pricing scale look different for currencies around the world, but the relative value of two currencies can change daily. Amazon will pay you in your local currency, so you don’t have to deal with converting the payments yourself. But you do want to be thinking about the differences when pricing your products on different marketplaces.
In addition to currency concerns, the cost of living varies in different places. In some countries, you may be able to charge more for your products than in the US In others, your US prices may look outrageous to the local population based on their typical salaries. Look into local cost of living numbers for each country you expand into and consider what pricing is reasonable.
For some sellers, the extra work and research involved in expanding won’t be worth the potential for new customers. But for many, the difference you can make in profits will make any extra work involved well worth it.
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