ChannelAdvisor have added full support for Amazon in France and Germany, including integration with Amazon FBA.
I’ve been hearing for some time from UK sellers that sales to France and Germany are up and that the current exchange rate favours UK sellers so if you’re already having success on eBay Germany or eBay France you should expect the same results on Amazon, if not better.
Amazon Germany grew at 58% last year (based on traffic) compared to 40% for Amazon UK, and Amazon Germany traffic is about 25% higher than in the UK. In France growth over the last year is 19% and overall traffic is about 50% compared to the UK.
If you are going to sell into Germany or France on Amazon then ideally you either need warehousing in those countries or to use Amazon FBA in each location. The danger of shipping from the UK is that shipping times and returns are harder to manage and if you lose a German or French Amazon account due to performance standards you could lose your UK account too.
Using Amazon FBA will mean locating product in Germany and/or France as well as in the UK, but from then on Amazon will handle all shipping and returns as well as your products qualifying for shipping discounts and express shipping.
ChannelAdvisor make it easy to list and manage sales on Amazon Germany and France as their dashboard is in English, but you’ll still need to have a German or French speaker (or at least to use a translation tool) to create product descriptions.
Regardless how successful your business is ChannelAdvisor recommend a multi-channel approach. Even if you’re not a ChannelAdvisor customer, as your business grows you should be considering listing on multiple eBay and Amazon country sites as well as your own website. Multichannel retailing will spread out dips in sales as well as increasing overall sales faster than you could achieve on a single venue.
Disclosure: ChannelAdvisor advertise on TameBay
