Amazon Global Selling is a convenient way to start selling your products in international markets. Aside from the US and Canada, you can sell in Mexico, the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Australia, Japan, China and India.
The program gives you easy access to a wider market, fully supported by Amazon’s various seller tools logistics network. The available tools will help you with product listing, currency conversion, international fulfillment, customs and duties assistance, and customer service in local languages.
With a well-built platform, Amazon Global Selling makes international selling almost done-for-you. You can get set up quickly if you meet all the requirements and start targeted advertising with a ready-made process to sell more, faster. It doesn’t matter is you’re an established brand or just getting started selling on Amazon.
About half of US online retail sales are made on Amazon. The chunk that Amazon claims on its international marketplaces is quickly growing to reach that proportion.
Imagine what you can do when you leverage the massive worldwide Amazon user base.
Amazon Global Selling Benefits
If you haven’t yet explored an international expansion, here are several reasons why you should consider selling internationally.
1. Global Retail Access
Amazon Global Selling allows you to be able to sell to the top international retail markets more quickly and easily than trying to enter these spaces on your own. By launching internationally on Amazon, you gain immediate access to 150 million more customers in 180 countries.
The process of getting your business set up to sell international can seem daunting. However, when you realize that a big portion of the work is already done – finding customers who trust enough to buy online – it becomes feasible, even for smaller businesses. You can find the greatest advantage on Amazon.
Amazon is the leading e-tail platform in the US, and they want to become the global leaders as well. This means massive investment into international e-commerce. Amazon knows how to grab an opportunity and will do all it can not to be left behind. Sellers should jump in this boat before it leaves the harbor. Amazon wants your unique products on offer to all its customers across its 12 marketplaces.
Take seasonal sales for instance. In the US, you have a few of these seasons every year. Worldwide, there are far more sale days spread throughout the year for you to take advantage of.
2. 3 Accounts, 12 Marketplaces
In the past 4-odd years, the program has attracted more than 35,000 sellers. Like them, you can get just a single account for each main marketplace – Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific – open up shop on any or all of the 12 sites that suit you best, and begin listing in the appropriate categories.
With just 3 accounts to manage to access the entire Amazon world, selling internationally becomes much simpler. Alternatively, expansion can begin in a single area. A seller set up on Amazon UK, for example, can already begin expanding into the 4 additional Europe marketplaces without having to set up new accounts,
Amazon Global Selling has another feature that makes international marketplace management even easier. The Building International Listings feature allows sellers to manage all their listings in one main area. When a listing and pricing are updated on one site, they are automatically updated across the other sites in that area.
3. Getting Paid Internationally
Amazon Global Selling makes getting paid so much easier with access to a built-in currency converter. With this tool, Global Amazon retailers in countries where Amazon has set up shop can get paid through their local banks, in their local currencies. For US bank account holders, using the tool is free.
If you are not located in any of the countries supported by the Currency Converter for Sellers, you can look into opening a bank account in one of these countries to take advantage of this feature.
4. Easy Fulfillment
Exporting product for sale to other countries entails enormous costs, a ton of paperwork, and loads of red tape and other hassles like customs, duties, import taxes and fees on top of shipments and returns. These all take up so much time and energy, too. But not on Amazon.
Amazon Global Selling of course comes along with one of the best features of selling on Amazon – Fulfillment by Amazon. With FBA on top of a customer base that’s ready and waiting for your products, the requirements for selling globally don’t seem as daunting anymore.
FBA Export takes care of not only picking, packing and shipping out orders, which is another huge headache of selling internationally, but it also tells you what can be exported to the different countries that Amazon serves by filtering through the different import and export restrictions governing the country you are shipping from and indenting to sell in. It also handles payment calculations for any import fees and duties on top of shipping. And these features come at no additional cost.
If you still want to take care of fulfillment on your own, however, you still can.
5. Language Support
Customer service is a third major challenge for international sales. Amazon Global Selling removes this problem by offering full support for all local languages in the countries where they operate.
For sellers, there’s a language switcher that they can use to select what language they prefer to use for their account. For customers, this means customer service in local languages. This includes all aspects of the shopping experience, like listings, Messages and the returns process.
Note that this is available for sellers using FBA. If you choose Fulfilled by Merchant, you will have to provide the same on your ow, along with either a local return address or free international shipping for returns.
Start Using Amazon Global Selling
Selling Internationally can be a complicated endeavor. On top of duties and taxes, there’s import restrictions, and you also have to consider other compliance obligations that you may have never heard of because they don’t exist in your country – or simply because you’ve never tried to export your products. Before you start, consider consulting an expert who can help you determine the best approach to the international marketplace.
That being said, here’s how you can get started with Amazon Global Selling:
Preparation
You’ll need:
– an international credit card for your monthly payments.
– proof of identity
– proof of business address
Marketplace Account
Follow these steps:
1. Choose the marketplace you want to sell on and register for a seller account.
2. Once your account is verified, you can start browsing categories and listing products.
3. Select your fulfillment option. If you choose FBA, you can then start sending product to Amazon warehouses.
4. Once your products are available to sell, you can launch advertising campaigns to give them a head start.
Final Thoughts
If selling internationally were easy, every seller with an aim to reach as many customers as possible would do it. On your own, you face unstable markets, massive marketing efforts, difficult customer realtions and expensive logistics. With Amazon Global Selling, much of this is already set up so that you can focus on your products and business operations.
