Amazon Germany

[Mister B]

We've been approached by Amazon.de to sell via their site directly to German consumers and I would be interested to hear if any of you guys are currently doing the same.

Would be interested to know of any pitfalls and the general success of the whole venture.

TIA

Mister B

 

[That Guy]

Are you already selling on Amazon UK?

The only difference I can think of would be shipping costs I guess?

 

[serious_sam]

We've also been approached by Amazon Germany. Received a suprising phone call from them the other day. It's worth a shot and we may do this in the near future.

 

[TotallySport]

you have to give free returns postage on all german amazon purchases.

 

[HTMLHugo]

surely you do in the uk due to the distance selling regulations ? or does this not count if delivery to European destinations ?

 

[Top Hat]

We looked at it but decided against.

You have to have translations.

 

[TotallySport]

surely you do in the uk due to the distance selling regulations ? or does this not count if delivery to European destinations ?

Amazon have never said we have to offer free returns, and yes in the UK DSR does apply but DSR is for the UK only, not overseas sales, free returns from Europe are much more costly as is postage going out, only for them to cancel.

They also expect you to be able to dela with communications in german, but there are ways of dealing with those.

Kind regards
David Russell

 

[kulture]

It takes MUCH longer to do straight forward tasks on Amazon Germany unless you understand german. The germans seem to ask a lot more questions, are quick to complain when the goods have not turned up in a few days, and EVERYTHING has to be done in german.
Yes there is google translate etc, but it all adds to the time taken to do the simplest task.

You need to factor in this additional workload before deciding to do it.

Also their currency exchange rate is poor.

 

[JamieM]

you have to give free returns postage on all german amazon purchases.

Just out of interest, how could you even implement a free returns procedure for Germany? Would you have to set something up with the German postal service?

 

[kulture]

You can set it up with the Royal Mail. Look on their web site. It is not cheap. There are two options, one is a returns label with your UK address, the other is a forwarding situation where you get a german address and the customer thus pays the local (national) postage.

Both options (from recollection) are expensive. It is often cheaper to tell the customer to bin the product.

 

[Mister B]

Thanks for all of your replies.



We actually had a long chat with the German agent yesterday and despite the barriers, we're going to give it a trial. Fortunately, we have room to manouevre within our margin structure to accomodate FBA which helps to solve most of the points that follow. So, for anybody that's interested, the main points that I raised were:

1. The obvious language barrier. Amazon.de require that if you provide a contact number, it must be answered by a German speaker. It is not a requirement to provide a number so we're not and so dodging the issue. We are however, required to answer all customer queries in German, all of which we are going to get a local student to do for us. Note though that we only ever receive one or two enquiries a week and they are normally associated with delivery. Using FBA should clear most of those up
2. Product descriptions have to be written in German. Some of our products are already on the Amazon.de database and will be translated automatically. The rest we will do ourselves but as we only plan to start with the real winners, we can suck it and see. It may be that if we grow with them quite quickly, we may have to enlist the help of a local German student to help us.
3. We do not have to register or pay German VAT. We simply supply our UK VAT number and pay VAT to the UK authorities as normal.
4. Payment is made to us, in sterling every second week just like normal. The exchange rate used is the spot bank rate at the date of exchange.
5. As others have mentioned, we have to provide free returns labels. this is the biggest issue for us as even though we have very few returns, (less than 10 a week,) it could still turn out to be a costly nightmare. As mentiond before, we're using FBA which again solves the problem for us.

That covers the main points, I'll report back in a couple of months and let you know how the trial goes.

Mister B

 

[patrick47]

We were going to start selling with FR and DE, however we didnt want to have to translate listings etc. So we had amazon search our ASINs and see what is already selling over there. Thankfully 80% of what we sell in this country had already been listed, HOWEVER:

When we had the spreadsheets we realised there were an awful lot of mistakes, basically the person who created and translated the listings, did a very poor job. So for us to sell we'd have to create the new listings and being a seasonal company (reliant on christmas) we just havent got the time to do this.

 

[TotallySport]

We were going to start selling with FR and DE, however we didnt want to have to translate listings etc. So we had amazon search our ASINs and see what is already selling over there. Thankfully 80% of what we sell in this country had already been listed, HOWEVER:

When we had the spreadsheets we realised there were an awful lot of mistakes, basically the person who created and translated the listings, did a very poor job. So for us to sell we'd have to create the new listings and being a seasonal company (reliant on christmas) we just havent got the time to do this.

If you pay or spend time doing the better translation unless you have a different barcode for the product both people would benefit from the translation, and whoever gets the blue box wins.

 

[Ishumashi]

We sell on Amazon.de - But as it was mentioned...Germans complain very fast and basically you have to have some own staff speaking German.