How To Expand into Amazon EU: Fulfilment Methods Explained

Want to expand your product selection out of the UK and into Europe but aren’t sure where to start? Read below to understand each fulfilment option available to you!

Currently, Amazon is in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, and Sweden with the last two being added in 2020.

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European Fulfilment Network

In early February, Sellers received a notification from Amazon that EFN was being reintroduced in March 2022. Hurrah! Selling in Europe without additional VAT registration.

If you are enrolled in the EFN programme, Amazon can fulfil orders to customers based in Europe who have ordered on their local Amazon marketplace sites (if you have an offer on those websites with the same SKU). For example, if a customer in Germany places an order on amazon.de, Amazon will pick, pack and ship your product from your UK FBA inventory to fulfil that order, completing all the necessary compliance for you to ship cross-border too.

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Because you don't hold stock in any of the European countries, you do not need to register for VAT in them, saving you cost and complexity. However, shipping times will be longer, which will reflect in the delivery promises and so conversion will be lower than those with locally held stock. EFN is now charged based on the local fulfilment centre so there is now no additional cost to EFN fulfilment, as there has been previously.

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Here is a link to Amazon's help page.

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Multi-Country Inventory

The next step of selling into Europe is Multi-Country Inventory (MCI). This enables you to ship and store inventory in any number of European Amazon marketplaces of your choice. You must be VAT registered in any country where you place stock into Amazon FBA. Once the stock is placed in an FC on the European mainland, stock can then be fulfilled cross-border to other countries in the EU, regardless of whether you have VAT registration there or not. You will pay domestic shipping rates and have a Prime-eligible selection in the marketplaces where inventory is stored. In the marketplaces where you don’t have stock, you will display slightly longer shipping promises and incur more expensive fulfilment fees when orders are placed (if you have created listings in those marketplaces). Stock is kept in the country you ship your replenishments to and is only shipped cross-border to fulfil orders.

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Here is a link to Amazon's help page.

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Pan-EU

Pan-EU is Amazon's flagship European fulfilment programme. It requires you to be VAT registered in the five main EU locales (UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain) and have live offers on the same SKU in every one of these marketplaces. You can then ship stock into any EU fulfilment centre, and Amazon's demand algorithm with move stock around the entire EU FBA network and place stock proportionately according to a country's demand. You therefore always pay the local rate for the fulfilment, even if in the back end Amazon does a cross-border shipment to fulfil a customer order. You also have Prime eligibility for all your selection.

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Amazon offers regular promotions for VAT registration in all the EU countries where it is required, to help you with the process (and make it much easier to do than replicating the process four times). It's not necessary to do the above steps sequentially, and a lot of Sellers go from EFN to Pan-EU in a single step.

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Here is a link to Amazon's help page.

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