Canada, Brazil, Mexico. All my automated listing transfers to those marketplaces either have no parent, or are just broken, auto-created pages.
Should I take these seriously at all? Are there sales to be had here, and what steps are required to really take advantage of these other markets?
Should I be doing images with the local language, for instance? Maybe really considered the prices?
Or is the money to be made, after all expenses, not worth it?
I think it depends on what you’re selling. Most of us know what you sell but we don’t have the knowledge of how those types of items sell in these other marketplaces.
If there is volume there, with less competition, and you can meet or beat the current offers for “like” products, it might be worth it.
We don’t sell anywhere else due to varying regulations for the category. That’s another consideration for you considering what you’ve been put through in the US marketplace.
I would like to sell internationally, but I don’t want to deal with international laws and fees. I let Amazon buy from me to sell internationally. There are so many other ways to do it that it confuses me.
Other than having Amazon buy to sell, which other ways are there for me to avoid fees and regulations?
Regulations is the key here. We let Amazon turn on FBA Export 2 years ago thinking they knew what they were doing. Literally thousands of orders were placed over a 3 month period to places where what we primarily sell isn’t OTC in those countries.
It literally took 3 months for the returns to start for about 70% of the orders to those countries that got nabbed by customs. That product never came back and we lost everything.
Amazon does not know the regulations of any country inherently or by AI. If you are selling something that is regulated at all, or more specifically, differently than it is in the US, be careful.
After this whole debacle, we did our own due diligence and curated what countries can order our products, which you can do through exclusion. Now we get a couple international orders a day vs. 40-50 when Amazon opened the wrong flood gates.
As some of you know, Ebay now provides a freight forwarding service to International Customers (EIS). US seller’s responsibility ends when their item reaches the EIS hub. Ebay handles all returns and eats any costs.
The issue of what is legal to send to the destination is handled by bot. Works as well as an Amabot. Sellers are now complaining because international buyers are unable to buy their products. Ebay has blocked exports by category for many countries, and some categories have mixtures of legal and illegal to import products.
A general issue is complicating this. The post-brexit UK is now requiring different safety approvals for some categories - like toys. Many US sellers are discovering their products are legal in the US and the EU but the manufacturers have not obtained the new UK approvals.
I lived without exporting for many years. Discovered that my international buyers are now the only buyers for certain “high-brow” products. Classical music retated, for example, and classic art. Older than 20 year old theatre as well.
I can easily live without Canada and Mexico, but not the UK, France and Germany.
Exactly why we haven’t. Figuring that we’d just be adding an exponential factor to the regulatory headaches.