Ways to boost online sales in European Union

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If you are selling physical products on Amazon, you might want to consider to expand to European marketplaces. And this video is about Pan EU. It's a program offered by Amazon which makes it easy to spread your Amazon physical products to different European countries. And in this video, you will learn what you need to consider when signing up for Pan EU program, what to expect, and which country could be the best to start with if you don't want to choose Pan EU. My guest in this video is Markus from AMZ Translate company. They help to localize your Amazon product listings in different language marketplaces. Hello, Markus. It's nice to have you here on our channel. Could you please introduce yourself and tell us what you do and how do you help Amazon sellers? Yes, thanks for having me on. My name is Markus Pfister. I'm 26 years old from Austria and I've been an Amazon seller myself for the last 6 to 7 years, from 2016 to 2022. I sold my brand last year and now I'm working on two projects. The first one is AMZ Translate, where we help Amazon sellers expand from one marketplace to the other European marketplaces with providing translations and SEO optimizations for those marketplaces. The other project is Seller Fox, which is an analytics software for Amazon sellers where you can track all your performance KPIs. That's everything to my person. Both links to Markus' websites and projects you will find below in the description. And in this video, we will talk about expanding your Amazon business to European marketplaces. We'll talk about Pan EU and how to prepare your Amazon products on different language marketplaces. So, Markus, we are ready to listen for your tips. Yeah, thanks. Let's jump into the presentation which I prepared. So we will talk about Amazon Pan EU and the translations you need for it. First, about myself again, Markus, 26 years, six years of Amazon experience, AMZ to translate. We have a team of more than 13 native speakers right now. AMZ to translate was founded in 2020, and we are the market leader for Amazon listing translations in the German speaking region, which is Germany, Austria, Switzerland. We already translated over 1,000 listings in over 200 projects within the last two and a half years. Why should you consider to use Pan EU or expand to the other marketplaces? The reason is you want to have more sales and more profit, basically, that's it. It's quite easy to do this with Pan EU because you have the review merging feature since two years, I think, which means you don't have to collect reviews anymore if you expand to the other marketplace to have a higher conversion rate. If you have, let's say, 100 reviews on amazon.co.uk and you expand to Amazon Germany, you will take these 100 reviews with you and we'll start right away with those 100 reviews. It's the same thing for all the other marketplaces. If you expand to Pan EU, you will also have less competition than on UK and Germany, which are the two biggest marketplaces right now. Germany is the most competitive one because it's by far the biggest one in Europe. UK is the second place historically. With the Brexit, the competition also started to decline a bit because it's more regulation, does cost a little bit more to ship your products to UK and all this stuff. But yeah, on the other marketplace, like France, Italy, Spain, they also have quite good volume but very lower competition there and much easier to get your foot into the door. At the moment or now, you already have easy solutions for the taxes and tax compliance. For example, you have the Amazon COS feature, Amazon Call of Stock, which is brand new. It's in beta stage right now. You also have service providers like Spacegoats. In both cases, you don't need to register for VAT numbers anymore in the other countries, and therefore, you don't have to submit VAT filings and all this stuff. That's pretty cool. Even if you go the way to register for VAT in all countries, there are also very good service providers out there who can help you with that. In the past, this was not really the case. I speak from my own experiences. I started at Pan EU in 2018. To sum it up, the experience in this field, there was not so much know-how at that time and this led to some problems. But nowadays, I can really recommend you to go for Pan EU because the text compliance problem is not a really big problem anymore. What's the long term benefits for expanding to Pan EU? You get more reviews because you basically have more sales and all reviews are combined. If you have more sales, for example, in France, you collect reviews in France and these reviews will also be displayed in Germany, in UK, and all the other marketplaces and vice versa. So you can really boost your reviews. Then you have more diversification because you're not dependent on one marketplace for your revenue and your profit, and you will have more sales and profit. Basically, you can sell say you can have 25 % to 100 % increase in sales. I always tell this number to German clients because I'm from Austria, I have to do with German speaking clients the most. If your home marketplace is Amazon France, Italy, Spain, you have much more potential because usually the distribution between sales from Amazon Germany compared to all other European marketplaces, excluding UK, is something like 60% Amazon Germany, 40% Pan EU. In some cases, it's even more German sales, like 80 20, something like that. You see that Germany has a very high volume. It is more competitive, but even if you only get a small slice of the pie, you will have a big increase in your sales. This all leads to a higher company valuation. If you consider to sell your brand in the future, this might be helpful and you can increase your company value. What is the recommendation from my perspective to do PAN EU? What's the blueprint for that? First, you have to do a market analysis and calculation. This is very important to have the right expectations. I always recommend use a tool like Helium 10 or Jungle scout. Go on the other European marketplaces, take the 5 to 10 top competitors for your product in this marketplace and then take the average of their monthly sales. Have a look at their sales price. If it's comparable to your sales price, then you already have a good perspective of what's possible. Maybe your product is extremely good, then you could also outperform the top competitor there and make even more sales. But to be realistic and conservative in your calculations, I always recommend take the 5 to 10 top competitors, take the average there, and then it's a realistic number of what you can expect. Then also very important, do a calculation because for all marketplaces, the FBA fees are different. For example, the FBA fees in France are nearly twice as much as in Germany and UK. Also in Italy and Spain, they are completely different. You have to do a new product calculation for that to make sure to be profitable at those marketplaces. Maybe you also have to set a different price for your products there. Maybe even lower if you go to Germany because the FPA fees are lower there, or higher if you expand from Germany to France, for example. Then you have to do the set up. This means you have to cover all the compliance stuff like taxes. As I said, there are service providers out there where you don't have to do the tax filings anymore, like Spacegoats or the Amazon Call of Stock program, or you do the VAT registrations. There are also many service providers for that. Then you have to do all the technical compliance, like packaging regulations. There are also a lot of good service providers out there who can help you with this because for each country it differs a little bit what information you have to put on your packaging and what symbols and icons. Then maybe there is also some product regulation. For example, if you sell electronics, you know that it's a very regulated market for supplements or cosmetics, please keep that in mind. Also trademark things. If you don't have a European trademark registered, then you should have a look into the register and double check if, for example, you expand from France to Germany, maybe your French trademark is also registered in Germany for the same classes, then you have to do something about it, or it is impossible for you to launch there. You should check that before you expand to Pan EU. Then as well, you have all the set up for your listings and Amazon stuff itself, which means basically keyword research, translation, SEO optimization, and setting up all the keyword lists and campaign structures for your advertising. If you did all this, then you're ready to launch. And because you take all the reviews from your existing marketplaces to the new ones, you can start right away with PPC. This is the best launch strategy I have. You don't need external traffic or anything. If you already have the reviews and a good price point and a good offer for the customer, just use PPC for launches. Yes, for example, in Germany, it will take longer because the competition is bigger. For other marketplaces where the competition is lower, you can achieve good rankings within a few weeks. Then if your product launch phase is over, you go into the ongoing optimization, which is basically PPC optimization every two weeks or something like that, depends on what your process is. Some people also use software for that. Things like price testing, A B testing for images, all the basic stuff you already do, hopefully, with your listings on your marketplace you're selling right now. Each of those phases is very, very important because only if you plan them and execute them correctly, you will achieve the best results. Biggest stumbling blocks that you can come across if you want to expand upon you. First one is wrong expectations, which comes from usually poor preparation because some people think, Okay, I can have 300 % in sales increase or something like that, but they did not do any analysis of the market on the other marketplaces. For example, if you do your analysis and then the result is, okay, I have a realistic potential of 50 % sales increase, you have a number. You should always have a good preparation. Same thing for product calculation. If you don't do it right, then maybe you have lower margins than expected because you didn't consider the higher FBA fees on the other marketplaces. Then tax and compliance issues, which is the result of a poor setup and also preparation. Please contact experts and service providers for those topics. They can help you best because there are also many changes ongoing at all these topics. It's not possible for an Amazon seller or for an Amazon expert like me to cover all of that and stay ahead all the changes. I really recommend you to reach out to a service provider for each of those topics to be sure to have everything set up in the right way. Then the next thing is a poor performance, which basically is the result of poor Amazon optimization, which means poor listing, poor PPC keywords, campaign structure, and poor product market fit, which is also the result of poor preparation. Because I always bring this example in Germany and Austria, people are very obsessed about their cars. There is a lot of stuff for cleaning your car and all these things. But for example, I don't want to be negative about any country right now, but in other countries, cars are not so important for the people. If you have some car cleaning stuff and you sell it very successfully in Germany, maybe people in a different country don't care as much about cars as in Germany. The volume there will be lower or people think they don't even need this product. You also have to do your research on this part here. Let's go into the translation and Amazon listing optimization stuff. For Pan EU, how you should do your translation and SEO right. Before I tell you, you can use service providers like Amazon translate. You don't have to. I just tell you the process that I recommend. That's our best practice from the last two and a half years. I think if you ask other service providers in this space, they will tell you the same thing. First thing you should do is perform a keyword research, even before translating stuff. Keyword research for each specific marketplace by a native speaker, because then this native speaker can already sort out the irrelevant keywords and only keep a relevant list of keywords. Then perform a translation, also by a native speaker who is also capable of the source language, because if you translate something from German to French, and it's a French native speaker, but this native speaker does not speak German, it doesn't really make sense because then the native speaker also has to use some translation tools and does not understand the source text. The translator should always be capable of both languages very well and the native speaker for the target language. Then you have your relevant keyword list, you have your translations, and then you can do the SEO optimization. You use a tool like Helium 10 or Jungle Scout or whatever. They have these SEO optimization tools where you can paste in your keyword list, you can paste in your translations, and then you can have a look, Okay, where can I implement the keywords that are relevant in title, in bullet points, in my back end? My best practice here for the title, you don't have to be 100 % grammatically correct. We all know this. People don't use the 100 % grammatically correct phrase in the search term because it's a suggestion from Amazon or people just want to save time. Good example here is yoga mat in French. It's a tapis de yoga. But people always search for tapis yoga and the there in the middle is cut away. The correct phrase would be tapis de yoga, but people don't search for it. I would suggest to use the exact search phrase in the title because it also saves some characters in the title which you can use for other stuff like other keywords or advantages or information you want to show to the customer. But in the bullet points, I always recommend to be 100 % dramatically correct and only implement keywords that are dramatically correct because it does not make sense to have a translation by a native speaker and then implement keywords that are not grammatically correct because this destroys the whole translation and the quality of the text. So for bullet points, use keywords that are grammatically correct. And for all other keywords that you could not implement in title and bullet points, just use your back end keywords. That's my best practice for you. If you do it, then do it right. I just wanted to show you the flywheel. If you do it right. If you have good keywords, you can do good Amazon SEO optimization. This will lead to a good indexing within the Amazon algorithm, which will give you more visibility. Then because of the quality and listing optimization, you have a good listing, which leads to a higher conversion rate, which leads to more units sold and a better ranking. Long term, you have more sales and more profit. Now, how the process works at AMZ Translate, for example. If you come to our website, you can already book everything, send us the text, then the project can start. Then we do a product analysis to understand your product, what's the benefits, what product is it, what's your competitors. Then we do a keyword and competitor research, which will result in a relevant keyword and ASIN list, which we will then provide to you as well. Then we do the translation. The result is a very good qualitative text. Then we do the Amazon SEO optimization where we integrate all the relevant keywords. Then we do a final quality check if all texts are correct and complete, and then we deliver it back to you. You have all the finished text within five to seven working days from booking and text transmission. We have two years of experience and worked already with multiple brands. Our process is very optimized and I'm happy to say that we are the market lead and the German seller space for this service. Thank you very much, Markus. The first question is, at the beginning, you explained that it is worth to open Amazon Europe account connected to your, let's say, North American account because you can transfer reviews and the whole listing is integrated across the marketplaces. Is there a reason maybe when it's advisable to create a separate account in European marketplace, maybe there is a risk, let's say, a North American account is suspended and then it affects European account if it's connected? No. You will also get this information from Amazon itself. If you have a European and a North American account, they are separated from each other. The European can be suspended, but it will have no effect on the American one and vice versa. Good to know. What countries or how many countries now we have in Pan EU? We have Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Netherlands, and Belgium. Eight countries. Then you also have Turkey and United Kingdom, which are outside of the PAN EU programme right now. I would always recommend to go for the Big Four, which is Germany, France, Italy, Spain. Then you can also expand to Poland, Netherlands, Sweden, and Belgium. Belgium is very easy because it's also in French and German. You already have the text for German and French. If you have Germany and France, I would also do this. If you sell on .com right now, you can also expand to UK right away because you have the English texts. From your experience as a translation agency, do you often have to adjust English text for UK marketplace when, let's say North American is coming and wants to expand in UK? Yeah, I would recommend this. We also offer this option. We offer translation into British or American English because there are some minor things that differ. Usually, you don't need a translation agency for that. If you're English speaking, you can give it to somebody, to a British writer or an American writer, and they can just make these changes and that's it. Let's say a North American business would like to expand to Europe, but they don't want to start with Pan EU, what would be your recommendation to go to UK or to go to Germany? What would be next step? I would recommend to go to Germany because it's the biggest marketplace in Europe. You will have the biggest potential there. You can also consider UK if it's more fit with the regulations and all this stuff. Once you're in the European Union, you can also go to France and all the other marketplaces. Uk is now separated from the European Union, so there may be some differences. I don't know exactly, but my advice would be Germany, and then France, Italy, Spain, and then UK. It's important to remind that it's not just so easy to create an account in Amazon Germany. You need also to register for VAT, value added tax, and I think you have to talk with your tax consultant. But there might be some requirements before you open an account. That's the old way, I would say. You can go for that. But the problem with that is if you're not successful, you have all these VAT registrations and all this stuff set up. Let's say the project is not successful for European expansion, then you have to get rid of all these registrations which costs money again. I would prefer a service like Spacegoats. It's free advertising right now for them, but basically you sell over their account. You don't even have to set up a seller central account in Europe. You're just selling over their Amazon account, send the inventory to Amazon within their Amazon account. It's a very easy option. They do all the VAT filings because they are registered in every country and you pay a small fee for each sold unit, but it's worth it. If it's working pretty well, you can also go for the VAT registrations yourself. But when you do the expansion, I would recommend to go for the lean version first. Link to SpaceGoats you will find below and also we'll put a link to a video where you can watch our interview with Space Goats where they explain how it works. Now, thanks a lot, Markus. One more time, how can people get help from you with your services? Yes, just visit our website, which is AMZ translate. Com. If you have any questions, just reach out to me. My email is also in the presentation of this video in the right corner and Markus@amztranslate.com if you have any questions, feel free to write me an email and I will be happy to answer it. Perfect. Thank you very much and good luck in your business. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye bye. I hope this information was useful and you will get inspiration to expand your physical product sales to Amazon Marketplaces in Europe. And if you need help with translations, don't forget to check the link by Markus AMZ Translate, where he can and his team can help you to localize your Amazon product listings. And now I would like to invite you to watch other video about expansion to Europe where we answer different questions with the tech specialist Alex Wyatt and Anton from SpaceGoats, the service we mentioned in this video.