Two relatively quick, but interesting pieces of news out this week we thought were of interest to Amazon sellers.
Amazon settles with Connecticut
First, if you read the part III of our Q4 report, we did a deep dive into Amazon’s fulfilment network. Just when we finished it, Amazon announced a deal with CT:
- In November, Amazon will collect sales taxes in CT
- Affiliates can fire back up (Amazon nuked them in June last year when CT claimed they created nexus)
- Amazon is going to invest $50m in the state over the next 2yrs in the form of a FC
- FC location was not announced.
That brings our 2013/2014 FC build out to 14 (bringing the total to a whopping 103 FCs)
Amazon’s annual report (10k) reveals new international details for first time
Amazon filed their annual report with the SEC (called a 10K) and for the first time they have included some details around the breakout of their non-domestic businesses. Specifically they included detailed (2010-2012) sales break-out for the UK, Germany and Japan.
Here is the new data with y/y growth rates also calculated:
I think many Amazon watchers will be surprised at how large both Germany and Japan have become and how fast they are growing. I’ve read reports that Germany is growing 10% and that’s clearly not the case. It’s also interesting to see how rapidly the ‘other’ regions are growing – 47%.
Here’s another view of the data. In this table we look at the 2012 share of international revenue per region:
Or if you prefer to look at it graphically, this pie chart shows Amazon’s global revenue per country for 2012:
As is usually the case, Amazon leaves us wanting more data. While it is great to finally know that Germany, Japan and the UK are the three top non-US markets, but what about ‘other’? While it’s only 5% of sales, it is growing 47% and is 12% of the non-US revenue. One way to get a view into that is look at the FC footprint:
What this (directionally) tells us is that China and some of the other EU countries (France/Spain/Italy) are probably the lion’s share of that Other slice of the pie.
If you are interested in selling into new markets leveraging Amazon, we have two posts out recently in an excellent series on this very topic:
- Post 1 – Expanding Internationally on Amazon for US-based sellers
- Post 2 – Cross-border trade on Amazon for EMEA-based sellers
Stay tuned, as I’m sure there will be a lot more news coming out of Amazon and we’ll keep you posted.
Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, wrote this blog post. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor
