I recently wrote a post about my first impressions of selling on Amazon.co.uk. My initial plan was to just stick with the UK and eventually translate all my listings once the UK site had really become established, but then Amazon.fr reached out to me and made it so easy that I went ahead and launched them all. I’ll break them down below country by country.
Amazon.fr
An Amazon France representative reached out to me weeks after the UK launch and supplied me with a list of ASINs that I had listed in the UK that already existed on Amazon.fr. This meant I could list this stuff and I wouldn’t have to create my own translated product pages. All I had to do was open the store, set up my policies, and then upload the sheet they sent me and I was live. An additional benefit is that some of the products that already existed in France were the exact ones I sent to FBA UK, so without changing a single setting I was now selling those in France as well via Prime. The selection I have in France is miniscule – only ~1% of the products I have on Amazon.co.uk – but considering how few products are listed, sales are fairly good. Plus, I can now get my feet wet in France and build up feedback. France is also set up just like the UK backend, so you can deposit the funds into a US bank account without a problem.
Amazon.de
I was so excited about getting France off the ground since it took, less than an hour of work, that I reached out to Amazon Germany and asked if they could provide me with the same data that Amazon France did. In a hilariously stereotypical response the German representative sternly explained to me that they are not France and in Germany you have to do your own work (not kidding). So I exported my ASINs from the UK store and imported them into the German store. What was available stuck, and that’s all it took. The German store did send me an email telling me they required someone to be able to speak German in order to sell there, and for me that’s not a problem since I grew up in Austria. If German isn’t your thing, you can hire a company like http://www.intercultural-elements.eu/ to do your customer service. I suppose another option would be to just run it through an online translator, but you’re not going to come off very professional doing that. My German sales have been much better than France, and I’ve actually had several returns and customer inquiries, so it’s been higher maintenance so far. They are integrated to deposit into US accounts as well.
Amazon.it
I have about 30 products listed on Amazon.it, but it works just the same. Just one warning: As with Amazon.es in Spain, this site doesn’t yet have the capability to deposit into a US account. You can deposit into any EU account, but if you don’t have the ability to set one up then you might want to hold off because you won’t be getting paid any time soon.
A great feature for all of Amazon Europe is that there is one seller central from which you can manage all stores. Simply select the country in the dropdown after logging in and it’ll pull up that country’s backend. All of them have English backends as well. Once you start getting orders you’ll also notice that they are all in the same orders view regardless of which country you’re looking at, so that just makes the whole thing easier to manage. Overall I’d say that all 3 of these combined are doing half the amount of revenue that my UK store is doing, but considering I don’t have nearly as many products listed that means that there is some serious potential.
If you’re set up in the UK then you can add all these stores in one afternoon by simply importing your UK ASINs, and I highly recommend you do so that you can take up more marketshare.
