Amazon wants to win over Sweden. The Swedes have other ideas

“It was very easy to laugh about what was what happened,” says Paul Fischbein, who chairs Fyndiq, Sweden’s answer to the online bargain marketplace Wish. “It was so way off, it was extremely poorly executed. They weren’t ready for a launch. That was clear.”

Less obvious than the mistranslations, but no less perplexing for Fischbein, was the way the pricing had been currency-converted from other Amazon sites so that Google’s Pixel 4 phone, was priced at 7,661 kroner and 78 öre (£675.11), using the Swedish version of cents that no local retailer ever would. He also pointed to the surprising absence of same-day delivery or Amazon Prime. “A company like Amazon will, for sure, fix these things, but it was a very embarrassing day for them, that’s for sure,” he says.

With its vast scale and market share in its core countries, you might expect Amazon to lay waste to the retail landscape in a small country like Sweden, whose 10 million people represent a market roughly the size of Michigan. The company currently has about 44 per cent of the e-commerce market in the US, and about 30 per cent in the UK and Germany. If it could achieve the same levels in Sweden, local rivals like CDON risk being wiped off the map. Despite that the leaders of Swedish e-commerce companies are remarkably sanguine. “We’ve been waiting for this for years,” says Hermann Haraldsson, chief executive of online clothes marketplace Boozt.

The way he sees it, Amazon is not competitive in the mid- to premium-range clothing business space where Boozt operates. Many prominent international brands are refusing to sell through Amazon’s platform and every sign that leading Swedish clothing brands will do the same. And he believes Boozt can more than match Amazon on customer service.

“We have one warehouse located very centrally, so we can actually serve the majority of our customers the same day, and it’s free shipping and free returns,” he says. “So even if they were to introduce some kind of [Amazon] Prime free next-day delivery, it won’t be better than the offer our customers get today.” CDON’s chief executive Kristoffer Väliharju is certain that the arrival of Amazon will change the Swedish marketplace, but he doesn’t expect to be squeezed out. “Worrying about Amazon is like worrying about Covid-19.” he says. “It’s a market adaptation. You just need to relate to it.”