Learn how to sell internationally with Amazon | Amazon Global Selling

When you select an Amazon marketplace in which to sell, you’ll need to understand whether your product is appropriate for your target country. First and foremost, make sure that you comply with all laws in each country. In addition, product standards differ across countries. For example, mobile devices operating on 110–220 V that use two-prong electrical chargers may not be appropriate for European marketplaces but could be appropriate for Japan. Similarly, feather beds you successfully sell in the U.K. would probably not sell well in the United States because the standard mattress sizes are different in each country.

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.

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 ecommerce marketplaces beyond Amazon. Use a search engine to find relevant ecommerce 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.