Amazon Global Store and you: how Amazon's cross-country selling affects your brand
It’s over a year since Amazon started Amazon Global Store, distributing products across different continents.
If you’re a consumer in Germany, you can now buy hundreds of thousands of products from Amazon Global Store US; if you’re in the US, you can do the same from Amazon Global Store UK.
What is Global Store?
Amazon is making the same products available to more and more consumers.
If you have a Vendor account with Amazon in Europe, it is already buying from you in one country and then making your product available in the whole of Europe. We see Global Store as the next step from that.
So far, Amazon.com, Amazon.de and Amazon.co.uk – the three largest Amazon marketplaces – are the only ones involved.
Will my products be sold globally?
Amazon is first targeting small items, to ensure the transport cost does not kill the profitability. Then it will target products or brands that are not active, or have little or no availability on Amazon. Third will be best sellers that have availability issues.
There is no data to show which brands’ products it is using. Our best guess is that they are using two sources: vendor accounts in Europe and in the US; and sellers that have enabled the function to let Amazon buy from their seller account (this option is visible in some accounts).
You can check if Amazon is buying your products by looking in Business Reports.
Do I have any control over this?
Yes – if you’ve got a Seller account, you can disable the function that allows Amazon to buy your product.
Other than that, your biggest risk might be that distributors and other businesses are selling your products on Amazon, even if you’re not selling on it yourself. It makes sense to get an account just to control what’s happening with your products. Then you can protect your brand worldwide with Amazon Brand Registry, and check who is supplying your products on Amazon.
More than ever, Global Store makes having a worldwide pricing strategy inevitable; if you’re a vendor, having a special price in Europe could mean prices going down in the US.