If ever there was a year for UK companies to look towards overseas markets, 2018 is it. With the pound remaining cheaper than its height before the 2016 Brexit referendum, overseas customers are ripe for the picking, while technology is helping to lower the barriers to entry into a huge number of markets.
For product-based businesses, one of the best ways to take those tentative first steps into a new overseas market is to sell on Amazon.
Why sell on Amazon?
If you’re unsure whether an overseas market is worth targeting, then selling your product via Amazon is a great way of finding out. Amazon allows you to sell to countries all around the world without risking valuable time and capital in building a website, ecommerce system and a coherent infrastructure from which to market your product abroad.
Yes, you’ll need to invest in some language translation services (we can help you out there) and spend a little time on a profile, but compare that to the complexities of entirely new websites and it’s easy to see why so many businesses are giving Amazon a go.
Let’s talk about Germany
For the sake of argument, let’s just look at one country: Germany. On Amazon, you can sell to almost any country worldwide, but Germany is a particularly good example of the opportunities on offer to UK businesses.
Germany is Amazon’s 2nd largest market, after the US, accounting for 10.4 per cent of Amazon’s total revenue. Of all sales on amazon.de, around half come from overseas sellers. In short, that means German Amazon is a vast market to be tapped, and a lot of people around the world are making money doing just that. This is a particularly extreme example, but you can see the trend repeated in multiple countries around the world.
How to sell on Amazon: What you’ll need
In a rudimentary sense, it’s not difficult to establish an Amazon account. You can sign up for a plan, opting to pay a flat monthly subscription rate or a per-item sold surcharge, then simply enter your details: contact information, company registration, and payment details. In essence, it’s little different from signing up for a Netflix subscription.
After that, all you’ll need to do is upload the product listings and hope the customers find your product.
How to sell on Amazon: What you’ll need to be successful
That being said – if you want to sell your product successfully on Amazon, you’ll have to put a little bit more care into your profile.
If you’re selling on one of the big four other Amazon European domains, Germany, France, Spain or Italy – you’ll be expected to market your product in the native language.
Amazon provides a lot of potential – but there’s also stiff competition. People want to know they can trust online brands – so they often look for professionalism when making a purchase.
However good your product, you don’t want to end up missing out because a competitor looks more polished, with a snappier company description and sharper or more accurate language in their product listings.
To sell on Amazon successfully, you’ll need a complete, professional profile, with credentials, branding information and product listings all effectively translated into, and targeted towards, the relevant target language and culture of your target market.
Doing all that properly isn’t easy – so talk to the professionals at Bubbles and find out more about our expert language translation services. We’ve helped a huge amount of companies in both B2B and B2C markets translate their Amazon listings to maximise sales.
