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Chris Thomas is back covering Amazon Australia and how the country launch has gone. We talk about spend of over $1bn, the Australian Arbitrage crew, damage to Amazon’s brand with negative sentiment.
- Been in eCommerce since 2001
- Invented a product and used Kickstarter
- Runs the Australian Seller podcast
Australians spend $1Bn on Amazon
- Australians spending over $1bn across the other marketplaces so Amazon decided to open the Australian store
- Australia has had a very resource-based economy and the economy is strong
Amazon comes to Australia
- Australia is a vast country and deliveries to remote areas must be a challenge
- Prime membership has quite good penetration into the rural parts of Australia
- Amazon FBA launched in Australia in Dec 2017 the most successful Amazon country launch
- There is a timezone change across Australia too
- Amazon has only two FBA warehouses in Australia, one in Melbourne and one in Sydney
- Focus on East Coast currently but can deliver within the 2day delivery service level to Western Australia too
Consumers
- Super excited too see Amazon coming
- A lot of pent-up demand with a bang when it took off
- Impact to other businesses in Australia since Amazon arrived
- Dread amongst bricks and mortar retailers
Launch Success?
- The launch was pretty half-baked
- Google had launched Google Home
- Amazon wanted a foot-hold for Amazon Alexa
- Opened with 7 million products and invite only of 500 x 3rd party sellers on the platform
- Europe and America had 500-600 million products
- Felt like scant offerings as No Prime and no FBA to start
- All fulfilled by merchant
- Amazon was fulfilling some from it’s Melbourne warehouse like pseudo-Prime
Negative Sentiment
- International Arbitragers came in and duplicated listings, jacked prices up a lot
- Australians are not stupid
- Amazon got called out for gauging and took a lot of negative sentiment because Australian buyers did not realise it was 3rd party sellers behind the gauging
- Negative sentiment upto Christmas and beyond
Taxation
- Around July 1st (beginning of Australia’s financial year) a change occurred
- The Australian Gov insisted that Amazon collect GST (Goods and ServicesTax) on their behalf
- Amazon reacted and stopped Australian’s being able to buy things from overseas marketplaces but they could browse
- Amazon had a big public relations row with the Australian Gov
- Australian Gov won the argument by claiming another multi-national was not prepared to pay taxes in the country
- GST is included in the price the consumer pays
Competition
- eBay has a strong presence in Australia and is quite mature as a selling platform
- Australians love eBay mainly because they have been established since the late 1990s in Australia
- There are lots of 3rd Party sellers on eBay Australia which means sellers are not confused by the platform
- Anyone that uses Amazon’s warehouses to fulfil eBay orders is not allowed
- eBay launched eBay plus – effectively Amazon Prime for eBay customers
Cut-Down Seller Central
- It’s a Seller Central cut-down interface that’s available in Australia
- A big omission is PPC and sponsored ads just discount codes
- You can do exclusive discount codes for promotional selling on Amazon Australia though
- Marketing is pretty weak, no early review programme and no EBC
- The algorithm works the same across Amazon marketplaces
- You can do giveaways and Facebook Ads to rank on Amazon in Australia
- As there isn’t much volume you don’t need that many giveaways to get you motoring
No Niches…yet
- The riches are in the niches which is not true in Australia
- The sales are in the top of the categories which means it is still early days with more to come
- They’ve just launched Pet and Pantry categories that tells us it is all new and there is more to come
Tools for Australia FBA
- One of the key tools for Amazon selling is eGrow.io which is basically a JungleScout clone
- Keeper is a good one
- Feedback5 is the automatic customer followup
