All Amazon sellers eventually consider taking their business global. The benefits of doing so are huge.
For example, being able to supplement your income by taking advantage of peak seasons in other countries – when your home country is in a slow period.
So here are 6 steps that’ll help you scale up your Amazon business worldwide and facilitate to expand eCommerce globally, without a massive up-front investment.
Step 1: Decide What To Sell – And Where
The first step is, of course, deciding what to sell and where.
If you have a small catalog this might not be all that challenging. But if you’re looking to expand your stock along with your potential marketplaces, there’s the easy way and the hard way.
When you decide to sell globally on Amazon, the hard way is to analyze the marketplace you want to target. Manually. In other words, roving through thousands of SKU’s to find the right products to sell.
The easy way is to use something like Algopix to analyze products quickly and easily. This way you can find the right products to sell quickly and easily.
Once you have a few feasible products to sell, in order to expand eCommerce globally, it’s time to move on to step 2.
Step 2: Decide On A Shipping Method
This is where things can get a little tricky. If you’ll be handling shipping yourself, you’ll need to find a good global shipping company that doesn’t charge too much.
But things are simpler if you use Amazon FBA, which now supports 9 countries. These countries are the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, China, and Japan.
So if you’re looking at targeting one of these countries, FBA is a viable option and should be considered.
This’ll mean getting your stock into the Amazon fulfillment center in the country you’re targeting. And for this, you’ll need to fill in all the required documents for the specific country, as you’ll be the importer.
Amazon will be able to help you with this.
Step 3: Consider The Pitfalls
You’ve got your product, you’ve got your shipping solution. Now all you need to do is pull the trigger to sell globally on Amazon.
But first, consider the pitfalls of global selling. Delayed shipping and credit card fraud in particular.
Ensure that you have processes in place to deal with issues such as these.
If you’re using FBA, you might be able to avoid these issues altogether.
Step 4: Register Your Account And List Your Products
You’ve got processes in place. You’re ready to go. All you need to do now is register your account in the country in question and list your products. Make sure to link your global accounts to your local account, too.
Once you’ve done that, it’s time to do a bit of advertising.
Step 5: Decide On An Ad Strategy
If you have the budget for it, advertising should be considered. Because as you’ll soon realize, you don’t retain your reviews when going global.
So your products will appear new to buyers.
So a little ad exposure could be required to get your product selling and get those reviews rolling in.
One more thing to consider is your product description in non-English countries. It’d be best to find a local listings expert to do your listings for you.
This step is optional but highly recommended.
Step 6: Sell
Now you’re ready to sell globally on Amazon. Get your ads running, make sure your non-English product descriptions are up to par, and sell internationally.
Don’t Give Up
It’s an exciting, scary experience when you’ve decided to expand eCommerce globally. And things may move slowly at first.
But keep at it and you’ll soon have a new marketplace (or 10) to use when things get slow locally.
Arguably the biggest benefit of having a global Amazon business is being able to move dead stock to where it sells like hotcakes – if you’ll excuse the cliche. You can finally say goodbye to deadstock, and doesn’t that sound nice?
Got any questions, concerns or additional tips? Drop us a comment below. We’d love to hear from you.
