Amazon have just published their UK SME Impact Report which highlights how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) selling on Amazon have created 250,000 jobs across the UK to date. Many small business owners have been able to adapt to recent challenges and thrive online for the first time. Over 15,000 UK SMEs selling on Amazon surpassed £100,000 in sales last year, and over 700 reached sales of £1 million or more for the first time.
More than half of all physical product sales on the Amazon store in the UK are from independent selling partners, most of who are small and medium-sized businesses. More than 85,000 UK SMEs now sell on Amazon – up more than 25% year-on-year. These businesses reached hundreds of millions of customers around the globe in 2021 – more than half of UK-based sellers exported to another country. They also sold more than 950 million products on Amazon, up from 750 million the year before, which is equivalent to more than 1,750 products a minute on average.
SMEs from across the UK are increasingly seeing success from selling on Amazon’s stores, supporting regional economies and communities. Many of these businesses are located outside of London – for example, North West England now has more than 12,000 sellers, up 35% compared to the year before; Wales has over 2,500 sellers, up around a third on the year before; and Scotland has around 4,000 sellers, up around 30% on 2020. Across major UK cities, SMEs based in Manchester, Belfast and Glasgow selling on Amazon recorded some of the highest average annual revenues, surpassing the average annual revenue of London-based sellers.
Last year around 50,000 sellers in the UK used Amazon’s fast shipping and inventory management service, Fulfilment by Amazon, and grew their sales by 25% on average.
Amazon Business, the professional procurement solution, helped tens of thousands of UK sellers reach more than five million businesses worldwide, selling around 20 million items across office supplies, hospitality, healthcare, maintenance products and IT goods, generating over £400 million in sales.
Through the hundreds of tools and services Amazon offers, and programmes like Amazon Launchpad, Amazon provides small business owners, start-ups and entrepreneurs with tools and opportunities to succeed. This extends beyond selling their products online, to include running delivery and logistics companies, using the cloud to launch and scale their businesses, creating voice apps, or publishing their own books.
To further the growth of small businesses, Amazon have also today launched an upgraded Amazon Small Business Accelerator.