Speculation is rife that the Amazon Australia launch could come before Black Friday 2017. Australians can already shop from overseas using Amazon but a homegrown marketplace and retail site has been a long time in the pipeline. But now it looks like the moment of launch is near.
This week at a sellers’ summit in Sydney the country manager of Amazon Australia Rocco Braeuniger addressed 600 merchants already signed up to sell, or interested in the prospect, and said the time of launch was getting “getting really, really, really close”.
It was confirmed that Amazon will be launching a marketplace in Australia as well as also selling its own goods as a retailer in its own right. Groceries, however, will not be part of the launch proposition but are expected to follow in due course. Amazon has already hired its first employees at its first Australian fulfilment centre. The facility is a 24k square metre warehouse in Dandenong South in Melbourne’s outer east. More FCs are expected to open down under in the coming months.
Braeuniger said: “We have the long-term ambition to be successful and to earn the trust of Australian companies and the Australian customer. We will be focusing on listening to the Australian customer, inventing on behalf of the Australian customer, delivering a great customer experience.”
It seems to us that launching Amazon Australia to great fanfare to coincide with Black Friday makes a great delay sense. It would be quite a coup. The question is whether sellers and fulfilment are all ready and it does seem possible that they are close to being fully operational.
If you’re an existing Amazon seller located in Europe, will you be keen to plug into Amazon Australia if the terms are right? Maybe you’ve already been invited. Let us know if you want your share of the Amazon Australia launch.
4 Responses
I have been invited and have applied. awaiting verification which can take up to a week
here we go. welcome australia to the land of next day delivery. 0 profits and 3 out of 10 returns.
don’t know if anyone else received the email we did, but we are expecting to go live any second. We have received an email stating the following “To prepare for the launch of the Amazon Marketplace in Australia we will start an internal testing phase with a small number of customers on Thursday 23 November 2017, 2pm AEST” obviously they are running behind on this launch but this supports the idea of a small launch for black Friday.