Deciding where and what to sell in another country's marketplace can be similar to making these determinations for your home marketplace. However, there are some added considerations when selling internationally.
One way to evaluate an international marketplace entry strategy is to use the '4Ps' marketing framework: Product, Price, Placement, and Promotions. Let's review each through the lens of selling internationally on Amazon.
Product: Choosing what to sell internationally+
When selling internationally through Amazon for the first time, a natural approach is to think about your bestselling products in your home marketplace. From your previous experience and from data in sales reports, what sells well? It's also important to ask yourself why you think these particular products do well. Will these same reasons hold true for the marketplace you are entering, or are there other fundamentals driving customer demand in the new marketplace, such as culture, climate, and demographics, including average age and income? Also think about how differences in marketplaces can benefit you. For instance, do you have seasonal inventory that you don’t know what to do with after the season has passed in one marketplace? You can extend your selling season by selling abroad where the product may find a new audience. Learn how one seller successfully used international selling on Amazon to build a business.
Tip: List broadly across multiple products rather than deeply in one or two products. Why? A broader selection of products means higher customer search exposure to your listings overall. This breadth can help you quickly gauge which products can be successful in a particular marketplace.
You can start slow while still maintaining breadth of selection even if you’re not ready to commit a lot of your inventory to another Amazon marketplace. If your sales spike, you can adjust your price or remove listings to mitigate stock-out risk, just like in your home Amazon marketplace. For an even smaller commitment, you can start by fulfilling orders yourself rather than sending inventory to another country. Remember selling in another marketplace doesn’t mean you lose control over your listings.
In deciding which products to sell in an Amazon marketplace, you of course have another key source of information available to you—observations of the marketplace itself. This sort of marketplace research should be very familiar to you from activities you likely conduct when selling in your primary Amazon marketplace. For this research, local language proficiency is extremely helpful. If you are trying to research a marketplace in a language unfamiliar to you, you may be able get some basic language interpretation from free online translator tools, but beware of relying too heavily on such tools.
In your target marketplace, review the Best Sellers, New Arrivals, and Featured Brand selections for your product categories. Read customer reviews to understand your competition’s strengths and weaknesses.
During this product research phase, you may find it helpful to broaden your search to e-commerce marketplaces beyond Amazon. Use a search engine to find relevant e-commerce sites by country. Trade publications and online seller communities in each country can also provide a rich source of information as you prepare to list products in their locales.
Tip: Keep in mind that potential customers of a particular marketplace may not necessarily reside in the target country. Some customers in each marketplace may reside in a nearby country, prefer to shop in a particular language, seek products only available in a particular marketplace, or otherwise choose to purchase out-of-country. For example, an Amazon.de customer may reside in Austria.
Price: Setting and adjusting your pricing+
The following are potential new costs to consider when selling outside your primary marketplace. These additional costs may change your profitability calculation:
- Shipping costs when you are shipping directly to international customers.
- International return shipping costs, if you are fulfilling orders yourself.
- Shipping costs to send your inventory to fulfillment centers abroad when you are using Fulfillment by Amazon. Learn more about shipping internationally in Ship and fulfill.
- Customer support costs if you are providing these services yourself in a local language or hiring a third-party provider to manage customer language support. Learn more about customer support in Customer support and returns.
- Conversion costs associated with getting paid in your home currency.
- Translation costs for listing ASINs in another language. Learn more about listing and translation in Register and launch.
- Taxes and duties. Learn more about taxes and duties in Taxes and regulations.
As you can see, many of the variable costs change based on whether you decide to fulfill products yourself or use Fulfillment by Amazon. Review the Fulfillment options section for more details.
Placement: Optimizing your distribution channels+
In addition to growing your international on-Amazon business, you can also consider growing your international business off-Amazon. The following are other services from Amazon may be relevant for you to develop this international strategy:
Multi-Channel Fulfillment
If you already use Fulfillment by Amazon to fulfill Amazon customer orders, you can manage online sales from other channels using the same inventory pool. Use Multi-Channel Fulfillment—a feature within Fulfillment by Amazon—to fulfill orders that come from sales channels other than Amazon, including your own website, other third-party platforms, and even catalog or in-store sales. Learn more about Multi-Channel Fulfillment.
Product Ads
Amazon Product Ads is an advertising service designed to provide Amazon customers seamless access to products available on external websites. As an advertiser, you simply upload your catalog and set your cost-per-click bids and budget. Amazon will then display your ads to Amazon.com customers when they shop for your product or related products. Customers who are interested in buying your product can click through to your Web site and purchase the product directly from you. Learn more about Product Ads.
Promotion: Making your listings more attractive+
As in your primary Amazon marketplace, Amazon provides tools that enable you to advertise and run promotions for your products. The promotional tools available vary by Amazon marketplace and may include Free Delivery, Money Off, Buy One Get One (BOGO), and External Benefits.
Visit the Understanding Promotions Help page (sign-in required) for more details on the type of promotions available. To see the steps to creating a promotion, visit Creating a Promotion (sign-in required).
Another way to increase exposure to your offers is through Amazon Sponsored Products, a cost-per-click advertising service that helps you promote the products you sell on Amazon.com through keyword-targeted ads.