Amazon is preparing to launch in South Korea and are advertising positions in Seoul with job titles such as ‘Account Executive, Amazon Global Selling’ and ‘Seller Support Associate’.
“The Account Executive will be responsible for identifying, targeting, and marketing Amazon’s global marketplaces to S. Korean Sellers of all sizes to grow the Seller’s business around the world.”
“The Seller Support Associate will be responsible for providing timely and accurate operational support to 3rd party Sellers on the Amazon platform.”
– Amazon job adverts
This is an interesting move on many levels. Amazon have already established their AWS platform in Korea, but the news of them opening up a marketplace with third party sellers has local businesses rattled. We’ve already seen Amazon’s voracious appetite in the US and UK as they expand from a marketplace into the supermarket sector for food and household essentials. Amazon are masters at putting infrastructure in place, growing a customer base and then rapidly adding ever more services (many free for Prime subscribers) to tie customer closer to their brand.
Amazon will go head to head with eBay (Auction and Gmarket merged to become eBay Korea in 2011), who are South Korea’s third largest retailer (14 trillion won) after Lotte (26 trillion won) and Shinsegae (18 trillion won). It’s reported that last year, Korea with 863.3 billion won sales was the third-largest market for eBay globally (after the US and UK) and so is key for the companies global expansion plans. That makes it no surprise that Amazon want a slice of the Korean market.
