Amazon still knows how to impress by posting a year-over-year growth in retail product sales of 19% in 2017 even though it’s product sales is well above $108.35 billion. In Amazon’s 24 year history, there are many factors that shaped and influenced it’s path to success, like the introduction of Amazon Prime. One of the biggest factors ise surely the launch of Amazon’s marketplaces where third-party sellers can sell products to customers. In the meantime, the marketplaces make up more than 50% of Amazon’s total sales with a clear trend going upwards. On the one hand, the marketplace allowed Amazon to offer a wider product range and doesn’t need to take risk in sourcing products. On the other hand, it helped thousands of online sellers grow their businesses. A clear indicator for this are the 140,000+ Amazon sellers, who put up a annual revenue of $100,000 or more in 2017.
Amazon is the biggest eCommerce website in France and home to more than 135,000 third-party sellers who have products listed for sale. However, only 66% have received at least one review in the last year which gives an idea about the actual number of active sellers. It is no wonder, that Amazon.fr is a popular destination for sellers, as France has the third biggest eCommerce market in Europe, is the sixth biggest economy worldwide, and is adjacent to other big European countries like Germany, Italy, and the UK. Additionally, with more than 15 million unique visitors per month on Amazon.fr, there are plenty of customers willing to buy online.
Amazon France marketplace research
While Amazon France is of moderate size, it is still growing everyday. Since the beginning of this year, about 250 new sellers signed up to the marketplace every day increasing competition for sellers already on it. Increasing competition means that for you, it takes more effort to stand out from other sellers and it becomes tougher to win the Buy Box Offering.
Algopix’s Amazon France marketplace research provides you with valuable information about your top competitors, such as their seller rating, lowest offering, Buy Box Offering, and more. This enables you to stay ahead of your competition and price products competitively.
Strict performance targets like a late shipping rate below 4% makes using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) inevitable
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) has been an important service to grow your business because it allows you to offload all warehouse operation to Amazon allowing you to guarantee delivery deadlines, quality customer service, and correct processing of returns. It also helps you keep a competitive edge, since over 50% of sellers on Amazon France use FBA. However, FBA is not for free but basically consists of two fees: the fulfillment fee and a monthly inventory storage fee. Depending on the size and weight of your products you’re selling, these fees can be higher or lower making it more difficult to calculate your expenses. For this purpose, Algopix’s Amazon France product research tool offers a detailed expenses analysis. Besides the total expenses related to selling the product, you will get a breakdown for taxes, shipping fees, marketplace fees, and any other costs that will come up when selling on Amazon France. With your expenses calculated, Algopix’s Amazon France product research even provides you with a profit margin so you can make faster product sourcing decisions.
Algopix’s Amazon France seller tool
In the past years, the share of Chinese sellers on Amazon’s marketplaces has seen a clear upwards trend. This is because many Chinese manufacturers discovered Amazon’s marketplaces as a lucrative market for themselves rather than selling to retailers. Cutting out the middleman allows these manufacturers to undercut other sellers’ prices on the marketplaces while still maintaining a solid profit margin. What is beneficial for the consumers isn’t necessarily beneficial for online sellers. Consumers usually go with the lowest priced product when confronted with multiple, identical options. Therefore, online sellers need to adjust their pricing strategy accordingly. As a result, profit margins are shrinking and some sellers might even get pushed out of the market. As an online seller you have to ask yourself whether you want to accept this price war that you cannot win or reconsider your sales mix.
Algopix’s Amazon France seller tool can save you valuable time when searching for new products for your online business. It will give you crucial insights into your competitors on Amazon France, like the number of competitors there are, the Buy Box Offering price, lowest price offered, and more so you will only choose products with little competition and can decide on a pricing strategy that will help you boost your sales. Additionally, you will be provided with a detailed expenses analysis breaking down any costs related to selling your product on Amazon.fr. With the expenses in mind, Algopix calculates an expected profit margin so you can get an idea about a product’s profitability. All this data is complemented by additional demand metrics, such as last month’s sales volume and gross merchandise volume (GMV).
An increasing amount of non-French based sellers are coming to Amazon France
France’s central location in Europe with borders to Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and indirectly the UK makes it an attractive destination for other European seller on Amazon’s marketplace. Thanks to Amazon’s European Fulfillment Network (EFN), it has become very simple for other European sellers to do business on Amazon.fr since it allows anyone to sell on any European Amazon marketplace from one single seller account. Almost half of all the European Amazon sellers are selling their goods in France in addition to their home marketplace.
Expanding internationally should not be a missed opportunity, especially when you’re selling a European market already. When done right, it will increase your sales volume resulting in higher profits and rapid growth for your business. As tempting as it sounds, you need to do thorough market research before committing to a new market because otherwise it might end in a financial loss. Algopix helps you shed light on all aspects of a new marketplace, be it demand-side, supply-side, profit, or expenses. Algopix’s competition level indicator and detailed analysis allows you to get a top-down view on the supply-side where you might be able to find niches to position your business in. Thanks to Algopix’s demand level indicator you can quickly get an idea of how often a product will sell. This information is complemented by Algopix’s Sales Estimator, which gives you last month’s sales volume and gross merchandise volume (GMV) for a product and grants you deeper insight into the market’s demand-side. Lastly, Algopix calculates any costs related to selling the product on a marketplace and gives you a breakdown of taxes, shipping fees, marketplace fees, and other expenses. With these costs in mind, Algopix provides you with an estimated profit margin for the product. This wide set of information regarding a product’s demand and supply will let you make an informed decision about the profitability of a new, international marketplace. You will get this information not only for European Amazon marketplaces, but also for Amazon US, Amazon Canada, and Amazon Australia.
There are hundreds of products that sellers have to go through to find one or two that are worth selling
French sellers have on average around 200 products listed for sale. Even for smaller online sellers it holds true that just a few products in your catalogue won’t allow you to be successful. However, searching through hundreds of products is time-consuming and tedious and most of the time you will have one or two products that are actually worth sourcing. Algopix’s Amazon France market research helps you free up time and scale up your search efforts by allowing you to research up to 200 products at once. You will get the same valuable insights as if you were researching one product at a time for each of the products, but only in a matter of minutes rather than hours.
