Amazon spent much of 2018 trying to convince North American sellers to consider expanding their reach overseas.
They even offered free account reps (which were pretty terrible in my experience) to assist you as you get started.
The Amazon assistance includes:
- Cloning your FBA listings into your (5) Pan-European seller accounts
- Translating your FBA listings into the native languages
- Adjusting your prices to account for the 20% Value-Added Tax that will be charged
- They help you get a free VAT number through one of their partner agencies (the agency hopes you will use them to help file VAT returns, but costs much more than their competitors)
- Amazon Seller software can automatically generate VAT invoices for your customers
My Experience With Pan-European FBA
I signed up for the Amazon EU selling experience in July of 2018.
Here's a glance at my current investment so far:
- Professional Seller Account: $39.99/mo
- SimplyVAT $281.98
- No one mentioned what a pain in the butt paying VAT is. I had to do a good bit of research before I ended up using SimplyVAT
- Amazon will recommend services that cost almost 2x as much as SimplyVAT - do your research before you sign up for anything
- SKU#1 product cost $2334.72 + $1424.896 sea shipping
- SKU#2 product cost $2070 + $570 sea shipping
- SKU#3 product cost $2070 + $570 sea shipping
- UK VAT Tax on first shipment (3 SKUs) $1993.65
- I'm told I should see a return on this eventually, but still waiting. Paid the tax almost 3 months ago
The 3 SKUs I launched were my most successful SKUs in the US, but apparently very few people need or care about them in the UK/Germany/France/Italy/Spain.
Advertising With Pan-European FBA
If you join Pan-European FBA through Amazon's global expansion program, your account manager will assist you in translating your listings into the native language for each of the 5 markets.
Unfortunately, your sponsored product campaigns won't be.
This means you'll need to launch sponsored product campaigns in each country's native language, one by one.
Here's how I set mine up:
- Use Google Chrome as your web browser, which will translate non-English pages for you
- Navigate to your European Seller Central account
- Launch your UK campaign as you would your US campaigns
- For Germany, France, Italy, & Spain you will need to change your account location first, and then go back to the campaign manager & recreate the campaigns
- If the page isn't in English, Google Chrome should display a translate popup
Personally speaking, my sales have been extremely slow, even with Advertising.
Making Extra Profit With Pan-European FBA
I use the Printful + Amazon integrations to sell merchant fulfilled dropshipped print on demand t-shirts & hats on my European Amazon accounts.
I wont go into a ton of detail as this post was meant to relate to FBA products, but you should consider expanding your merchant fulfilled listings via the Printful integration as it doesn't cost you any additional money.
As of writing this, they have a fulfillment center located in Latvia that can fulfill orders to the markets included in Pan-European FBA.
Why I'm Upset With Pan-European FBA
My biggest gripe is that Amazon pushed selling overseas very aggressively on US sellers, but offered very few incentives.
They would seemingly send at least one email a week, trying to convince sellers to attend a (pre-recorded) webinar on selling internationally, & even partnered with some of the larger third-party brands to advertise international selling for them.
Eventually I caved and attended the webinar, and decided to follow through and give it a shot.
I had an account manager guide me through the process, but the truth it that they were very poorly equipped to offer the guidance that a seller actually needs to be successful, as they 100% do not sell overseas themselves. Amazon converted my FBA listings into "EU" listings (meaning they were converted for sale on the 5 marketplaces listed above), but even that came with bugs and poor translations in certain scenarios.
To make matters worse, the account manager was extremely persistent with pestering my via email asking for progress updates (I'm assuming they had an internal incentive to get me up and running).
They only talked about Amazon/Seller Central related issues, and ignored one of (if not) the most complex items: Value-Added Tax, or VAT for short.
The VAT / HM Revenue and Customs website is absolutely AWFUL. It makes doing simple things like creating an account and actually logging in & attempting to file a return nearly impossible (at least it was for me, a BS/MS holder in information technology...). As a result I opted to use an agency, as anyone should, because it's not worth the headache.
Ultimately, dipping into Pan-European FBA is going to be a losing venture for me. I am confident that my merchant fulfilled Printful products will allow it to be profitable in the long run, but I don't see how I can make a profit off of my FBA investment.
It's a great learning experience though! (I tend to write-off losses as "learning experiences" to make myself feel better!).
