Amazon introduces cross-continental selling: The impact of Global Store on your brand
We’ve recently come across several huge seller accounts with the name ‘Amazon Global Store’.
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 Amazon doing?
The world is becoming flatter and flatter, closer and closer. It happened first with communication technology, and now physical products can move faster around the planet too.
Amazon grew thanks to improved logistics, first inside the US, then in other countries. It is doing the same now with transcontinental business.
Why are they doing it?
Amazon wants to have the widest retail offer in the world, so it’s 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. Global Store is the next step.
Will they do this with my product?
Amazon is first targeting small items, for which the transport cost will 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.
How are they doing it?
There is no data to show where Amazon is getting the products from. 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).
What should brands do?
Distributors and other businesses might be 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 look into protecting your brand 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.
Watch our video to find out more:
