#703 - Amazon Global Logistics & EU Expansion

#703 - Amazon Global Logistics & EU Expansion Speaker 3: Today, we're live at Amazon Accelerate and we're going to be talking about two factors of Amazon you might not know too much about, Amazon EU and AGL. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is a show that's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we are here in Seattle right now at Amazon Accelerate. Alex, we're in Seattle right now. Are you also from Seattle? Speaker 1: I'm not from Seattle. I live in Nashville in Tennessee. I lived in Seattle for almost 10 years kind of early in my Amazon career and I've since moved over to Tennessee where we've got a couple new offices. Speaker 3: Where were you born and raised? Speaker 1: I was born in Minneapolis. I grew up all over. My family moved a ton. So I was in Minneapolis, St. Paul area until I was about 10. We lived in Ohio. We lived in Kentucky. I went to high school in Texas, so I've seen a lot of the country. Speaker 3: Where did you go to college at? Speaker 1: I went to the University of Missouri, so kind of right in the middle of that. Speaker 3: Oh, no. This is the first time I don't know. I know they have a good football team, but I can't think of the mascot for University of Missouri. What is it? Speaker 1: One of the most common ones. They're the Tigers. Speaker 3: The Tigers. No wonder. I only know the weird one, like Boilermakers or something from Purdue and stuff like that. Okay. Missouri Tigers. All right. And what did you study there? Speaker 1: I double majored, so I went there to go to journalism school. So coming out of high school, I was super interested in sports journalism, writing, all those pieces. They got a really good journalism school at Missouri, so that's why I went there originally. As I progressed a little bit through it, it became a little more clear that journalism was declining kind of relative to where it had been. I was also interested in finance, so I kind of picked up the business major in finance, and that's where I started my career. Speaker 3: Okay, and then when you came to Amazon, what was the first department you worked in? Speaker 1: I was in finance when I first started at Amazon, and I was supporting our operations team, so primarily our development technical software engineering teams who built all of the software that supports our fulfillment centers, all of our middle-mile areas, and effectively trying to help them put return on investment relative to all the resources that they had. Speaker 3: Now, what's your position at Amazon? Speaker 1: I lead our global logistics team. For sellers, that includes Amazon Global Logistics, which is our product where we help sellers import goods from other countries into the U.S. and get them into Amazon's network. I also lead the Partner Carrier Program, so that's for sellers who have They're good stored domestically and then they're trying to enter the Amazon network as well. Speaker 3: Cool, cool. And that was actually one of my first questions is what AGL stands for, which you just answered. I actually have a list of questions here that when I knew I was going to interview, I asked our audience because that's something I have no experience with. I'm going to be learning a lot with you guys out there. So you answered what AGL is. Now, another three letter acronym at Amazon that has to do with logistics more domestically is like AWD. So first question I got from a couple of users was, To use AGL, do I also have to be using AWD to tie them together? Speaker 1: So the short answer is no, you don't. And I'm happy to take a step back and give you a little bit of context on kind of a short answer of, you know, conceptually, what is AGL? How do we get started? And then I'm happy to get into how it relates to AWD. So in short, AGL is just a freight forwarding program for sellers who are trying to move their goods right now from China origin into the US. So simple as that. And there's obviously lots of freight forwarders out there. And sort of where it originated from was way before Amazon figured out the magic of FBA sellers, we obviously were buying inventory ourselves, selling 100% of our own retail. And we had to do the same things in terms of moving goods either internationally or domestically into our network. And as we grew, we set up pretty sizable operations to be able to do so. And as the seller business started to take off, it became clear, like, why wouldn't we externalize that to sellers? I mean, they can benefit from our scale. It can make things a little bit easier. So that's kind of how we got into the AGL style business that we're in today. And then back to your question, for sellers who want to use AWD, it's an option. So you can use AGL to go direct into our fulfillment centers, or you can use it to go into AWD and then from there go into fulfillment centers. So completely optional for them. Speaker 3: Awesome. All right. So for somebody like myself, another brand out there that might be listening, maybe, you know, we've been importing to the United States, we manufacture overseas, and we have our own kind of like system that we're happy with it, we're unhappy with it, whatever the case may be, why should we consider AGL? Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a couple of things that come to mind. I think, you know, first and foremost, there's, you know, probably tens of thousands of freight forwarders out there. You got some based in the US, you've got some based internationally. We're the only freight forwarder whose only business is with sellers. So, we obsess every day about how do we make AGL the fastest, easiest, most economical way for sellers to get their goods into the Amazon network. So, we get to come to events like this and obviously immerse ourselves with sellers, their experiences, the unique challenges they have. So, we're purely working backwards from them. When I think about AGL, I think there's kind of two pieces to it. I think one is foundationally we need to have really strong services as it relates to transit time, reliability, and getting things into stock for sellers. I think that's just foundational and that's required for us to be at parity with best-in-class freight forwarders. I think we're getting really close on a lot of those things. I think it's a lot of good progress the teams have made over the last three to five years to get us there. Then the next question is, okay, if you can do those things at parity with best-in-class freight forwarders, What sets you apart? How do you start to differentiate yourself? And I think I'm going to get into some things later in our conversation, but our proximity both to our operations in terms of our FCs as well as our proximity to the FBA business, I think, give us the opportunity to start doing those things. Speaker 3: Okay, cool. Now, you might consider this a silly question, but it's on the mind of some sellers. There's a lot of paranoia among sellers. It's kind of like when you go to events like Accelerate, nobody wants to say what product they're selling. Like, oh, I sell in The health and household niche or something like that, that's about as close as you can get. But some brands were telling me like, I'm not sure if I want to use AGL because now Amazon's going to know my supplier and my product and my address and that's dangerous. Like, is there something you can say to like set their minds at ease at all? Speaker 1: No, totally. I completely understand that concern. I think the short answer is, you know, any information we get on manufacturers, where to pick goods up, never makes it to Amazon Privates Brands team. It is only used for the pickup of those goods. And I think just to give a little more context on how that works, if we're picking up goods from a factory in China per se, obviously we're going to have sellers. They're going to say, hey, here's what my goods are. Here's the date they need to be picked up. We actually use third parties in China to pick up those goods and bring them to port. So of course we are relaying that information to those third parties, but that information is not used within Amazon for any other purpose than kind of relaying the information to third parties to pick up those goods. And I think the second thing I would say is, We've got a lot of sellers who've been with us for five or ten years, kind of since AGL became a thing. A number of those sellers, one of whom I just did a panel with probably a couple hours ago, he's in a category where there's a lot of Amazon private brands. He's been with us forever. He's had no issues. I think the other thing I'd recommend folks doing is I bet it won't be hard to find a seller who uses AGL. I think you could just ask him and say, hey, have you ever had concerns with sharing your information with Amazon? Have you ever had us kind of do anything sideways? I'm very convicted the answer would be no. Speaker 3: I highly doubt that I sell coffin shelves. If I start using AGL, all of a sudden there's an Amazon Basics coffin shelf or something. Probably not. Now, I don't know the technical terms of these things, but I know I've done lots of different forms of shipping. Just a few weeks ago, I had some fast air, where it was like three days. I had some, I don't know if it's called slow air, where it's like seven days. I've done slow sea shipping and fast sea shipping. Which of these, again you can probably give the more technical terms here, what does AGL cover? Speaker 1: Yeah, so we aim to kind of cover the whole gamut of what you just mentioned. The very foundational is going to be standard ocean, what you refer to as slow ocean. So basically just kind of your run of the mill, very average sort of speed in terms of transit time. Containers are going to get unloaded in the order they are kind of put on the boat, so to speak. We also offer what we call FastOcean. And there's kind of two versions of that in the industry. So what AGL offers today is, you know, you get priority at origin as well as at destination, and primarily in terms of destination where your container is picked off the boat first, it is prioritized for drayage first, you know, from port into the FC. So you're going to shave off, you know, anywhere from two to five days in terms of that transit time. There's another version in the industry, which AGL isn't quite in yet, but I think it's something we're looking at for 2026, which is You know, there's a carrier called Mattson who uses smaller boats. They're a little bit faster. So they actually cut off sort of transit time, you know, from origin to destination. It's obviously a more expensive kind of premium service, but we are getting some interest for sellers. So it is something we're looking to explore. Speaker 3: Interesting. Okay, cool. Another question. This was actually my one of my questions is, I've been importing products for more than 25 years. And in the early days, I would import containers of like car parts. I was in the whole Fast and Furious kind of like car scene. And I had to get my own custom broker. I would go and have them clear customs and go through all that. But then, you know, for my Amazon businesses, usually, like, you know, my freight forwarder kind of handles it or whoever I, you know, have a sourcing agent who handles that kind of stuff. When I import with AGL, who's clearing the customs? Speaker 1: Yeah, so it sort of depends. If you're shipping full containers, you can do it with any customs broker you want. We have an in-house customs broker. The organization is called Amazon Customs & Trade. Like I mentioned earlier, we had set up our own operations to be able to run our own retail business. For that reason, we also set up a customs broker so we could do it ourselves. That's also a service that we externalize to sellers. And kind of our thought with ACT is obviously we want it to be seamlessly integrated into what we're doing with AGL just to make things super easy. But we also wanted to offer a service that allowed sellers to sleep a little bit better at night in terms of our goal with ACT is to always be compliant, to always be above board. I think it's really important kind of given what's going on in the world right now and perhaps what's about to come. That's kind of our thought with ACT. So if you're shipping full containers, you can use any customs broker. You can bring your own. You can use ACT. If you're shipping less than container load or LCL with us, we do require you to use ACT because obviously we have to string together kind of multiple customs declarations for multiple customers in the same container. Speaker 3: Okay. Makes sense. Now, you mentioned a little bit earlier that I don't have to send AGL shipments to AWD, but what other options are there? Do I have to send it directly to FBA? Can I have it go to my 3PL or even directly to me if I have my own warehouse? Speaker 1: No, it's a really good question. Today, right now, it has to go into the Amazon network. One of the things that we're building towards, and I think 2026, 2027, we'll see it as a little bit of what we call externalization of AGL. How do we become a freight forwarder in the sense of potentially helping off Amazon business? It could be like you mentioned in terms of there's a seller who wants to use AGL to ship to their own warehouse to a 3PL. We want to be able to support that. We also want to be able to support businesses who might not be doing any other business with Amazon but just want to leverage our scale. Hopefully, we're able to get some kind of pricing benefits and obviously quality benefits for them. It's a big source of investment and time for the team right now. Speaker 3: Now, something I didn't think about, again, because I don't import as much as maybe some of our sellers in our community, but they were wondering, you know, sometimes there's like backups at certain, I don't know if it's called FCs, DCs, wherever, you know, the shipments, you know, come into for your replenishment. I know when you set up any kind of shipment, whether it's AGL or anything, you're already assigned or choosing a certain facility to send it to. But let's say there's something going on at that facility, there's a known backup. Is AGL able to reroute it to somewhere else? Or no, once you lock in where you're sending that shipment, it's got to go there? Speaker 1: Yeah, short answer is yes, we can reroute. But there are some constraints around that right now. And then there's some thoughts we have for the future. Let's say your boat's on the water and that congestion hits and you're seeing those constraints. We can reroute within a node. So, for example, let's say a boat's heading towards Southern California and it's heading towards a specific building. If there's congestion at that building, we can reroute to another building within the Southern California node while that boat's on the water. It's just a change and kind of drayage from port to which building it's going. Obviously, we want to fix everything on the back end. If it's a little bit upstream of that, let's say we've picked up your goods at origin but the vessel hasn't departed yet and you see congestion, then we can actually switch between notes. If you wanted to go Southern California to Northern California, or even to the East Coast, right, we can just kind of pull those goods, make sure they get on the right vessel, fix everything on the back end. One of the other kind of investment areas I'm very excited about is what I want to be able to do is have that vessel on the water and be able to change nodes live stream. Now, there's a little bit more complexity with that in terms of, well, how will you actually truck it? Will you put it on rail? And the teams are trying to work through, but I think it'd be a great benefit for sellers to be able to have. Speaker 3: Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. I remember last year there was, or a couple of years ago, it was not here for the United States, but EU was, was, you know, had a lot of trouble with the, was it the Suez Canal or somewhere? It was kind of blocked, but it'd be good to reroute, you know, if possible. That's kind of a hard reroute there, but, but things like that, you know, things like that happen. So I think while I haven't used AGL, I know a lot of people who have and almost all of them are importing from China just because that's kind of like where most, I think, Amazon sellers in the United States at least are manufacturing their products. What if I'm, you know, manufacturing Pakistan, India, Korea, does AGL work out of those countries as well? Speaker 1: Great question. So today the short answer is we only do China origin right now. That'll change in two weeks when we launch Vietnam as an origin. So we're super excited for that. And I think a little bit of context to kind of share with you is, you know, the vast majority of sellers have historically manufactured in China. So the team has been very, very focused on that. I would say, you know, 18, 24 months ago, it became clear to us that, hey, expanding to more origins and more destinations is going to become a priority to sellers and that obviously accelerated earlier this year with a lot of the policy changes that we saw. So, we've spent a lot of time in the last 9 to 12 months adjusting our technical architecture as it relates to expanding origins and making sure all the right services are kind of hooked together. And so now it's going to take us a lot less time to launch new origins. So we're expecting to do about five new ones next year. So Vietnam is the first one this year. We're also going to do more destinations. So we're going to add Australia. We're going to add Canada. India as an origin is currently on our list for 2026. That one's a little more interesting because in the last couple of weeks, there's been a little bit more policy back and forth kind of across the countries. So it'll be interesting to see where that pans out. But our full intention is to say, hey, Now it's easier and faster for us to be able to launch more origins and we want to capture as much seller volume as we possibly can within our services in terms of being able to service it. So as we see different locations pop up, we're able to kind of launch those locations as well. Speaker 3: So that was the second part of my question, I think, unless I misheard it. Destinations right now, it's only United States or what about if I'm selling to EU? I think you mentioned Australia. Speaker 1: No, it's a good clarification. So today, China is the origin. You can go to US, you can go to UK, you can go to the EU, you can also go to Japan. We launched that earlier this year. So we have a handful of destinations. We want to add more. That lane from China to Canada is actually pretty thick and we see a lot of volume on it. Very similarly, we see a lot of volume from China to Australia. So that's why we're prioritizing those two. So we've got more destinations today, but we're going to continue to add to them. Speaker 3: Okay, so you've touched on a few of the things in the pipeline that's coming. Bigger picture, long term, like how do you view the AGL program, you know, moving forward? Speaker 1: Yeah, and I kind of referenced earlier, right, I think there's that foundation of speed and reliability and just getting things into inventory fast. That's just extremely basic that we need to be really, really good at. And then we need to start differentiating ourselves. And, you know, when it comes to differentiating, there's probably two investments that we're currently working on, some of which will happen in 2025. Some of which will happen in 2026 that I'm super excited about. I think the first one is when you talk about speed and obviously ocean freight, there's a lot of ways to look at it. You're looking at port-to-port time. Are you looking at end-to-end? Are you looking at from port to FC? And we're talking about FC. Are you talking about the truck getting dropped off with the container or are you talking about the goods actually getting into sellable inventory? Clearly, the more and more sellers I talk to, sellers care about things getting into a prime bin. When is it sellable? When can it go to customers? So one of the ways we're trying to work backwards from that to make sure we're aligning our goals to what sellers are looking for is when you go book through AGL, and this is in 2026, we're going to offer you a time to prime promise. So we'll be able to say, hey, if your cargo is ready on this date, This is the promise state by when it'll be in a prime inventory bin, when it'll be pickable, when it'll be sellable for customers. And I think our integration sort of obviously with Amazon is going to make that a very unique proposition. I think it's going to make things much more simple for sellers when they log on to Seller Central or Shipper Central. They can see in that portal where their goods are at in that full line from Origin into Prime Pickable, understand, hey, is it on time? Is there any kind of delay? Where are we at relative to that promise? That's the most common question we get asked. It's like, hey man, I don't really care where it's at. When's it going to be sellable? I think that's totally right. We need to be working backwards from the same thing. I think one of the challenges with Amazon, it's a really large company, is you're talking about multiple different large organizations within the company who own pieces of that supply chain, but we shouldn't show those seams to customers. They shouldn't care. They shouldn't have to know. We should just tell them when it's going to be sellable. That's the first one I'm super excited about. The second one is I'll get into placement options a little bit. So when you ship with AGL, you can choose where do you want to send goods. And what I mean by that is we launched something in 2024 called Amazon Managed Placement. And so what that means is sellers can combine a bunch of goods into one container and they can send them to one of our national IXDs. And those national IXDs are domestically in the United States. And then we as AGL will be responsible for deconsolidating that container and distributing out amongst the regional IXDs. And it's a big simplifier for particularly small and medium sellers, but we've seen a lot of large sellers use it as well. And it just allows sellers to kind of consolidate everything into one container, not have to deal with LCL and then let us handle kind of the complexity of deconsolidating and spreading. So we had good uptick on that kind of product this year and we've gotten some good feedback from sellers. But from larger sellers in particular, they're like, hey, you send it to a national AXD. I got to count on a few days for you guys to unload it, to process it, and to redistribute it. It's totally right. There's also a fee associated with the service and larger sellers are like, hey, I don't really want to wait for the time. I don't really want to pay the fee, which is understandable. So, a couple months ago, we launched something called Seller Managed Placement, which is a nice kind of complement to Amazon Managed Placement. And what Seller Managed Placement or SMP is, is if you want to skip that national step, you can use AGL to send directly downstream to regional IXDs. You can do it with full containers. You can do it with less than container load as well. And really what that is, is just an express shipment through AGL downstream to the regional IXDs, and you're skipping that national IXD step. So, you're saving the time on the processing. You're saving the money in terms of the fee that gets charged for Amazon Managed Placement. I really like how those two are kind of complementary to each other. To round out that portfolio, something that's coming in Q1 or Q2, we call origin splits. It's sort of a combination of the two. What this allows sellers to do is they can ship us any amount of goods, call it a container for example, to AWD at origin. It doesn't have to be stored. We're just processing at the AWD location. What we'll do is we will deconsolidate the container that sellers send us, and then we will reconsolidate more containers with other sellers' goods. Let's say we're shipping downstream to 50 separate regional IXDs. You send a container in. We deconsolidate it. We then reconsolidate five different shipments within that container into those 20 containers I mentioned, but we've got so much volume going to each of those downstream regional IXDs. A, I can give you the cost benefit because I can better utilize that container, it can be more full. And then B, you can get effectively FCL-like pricing for LCL-like shipments. And at the same time, you're skipping the national IXD, you're skipping the touchpoint, it's going direct from origin to those regional IXDs. Speaker 3: Interesting. I want to ask you, what's your thing... If you're able to say that you're most excited about for next year, but before I do that, if somebody is really pumped up from just what we've heard about so far, where do we go, including myself, if I want to get more information on AGL or just go ahead and sign up? Speaker 1: Yeah, so if folks are looking for AGL, I think there's kind of two steps I'd take. One is if you go on Seller Central, you can search for AGL. It's in one of the dropdowns. It should be clean. But if that doesn't work, you can always just go to Google, search Amazon Global Logistics. That should help you. Speaker 3: Awesome, awesome. All right, well, thank you so much for sharing all this information. I just learned my knowledge went from level one to about seven here for AGL. I think I might start considering this. I'll hit you up if I have any questions. You guys can't all hit them up, but I can. Host privilege here. But yeah, this sounds like a good program. And I think a lot of what you said kind of like alleviate some of the concerns, you know, especially about, you know, the time and that promise thing is gonna be super cool once it once it comes out. So thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. And maybe we'll link up next year at accelerate again and see what's new with your program. Perfect. Speaker 1: Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. Speaker 3: Thank you. And we are here and talking about things that we have never talked about on the podcast before. So first of all, would you like to introduce yourself to our audience? Speaker 2: Sure. My name is Mike Stiles and I'm with U.S. Global Selling. Speaker 3: Awesome. Are you from this area? Speaker 2: Yeah, born and raised in Seattle. Speaker 3: Born and raised in Seattle. Did you even go to like college, university? Speaker 2: I went to University of Washington. So yeah, I go Huskies. Speaker 3: Huskies. I was about to say that's one of the things I do. I try and see if I can know the mascot there. What did you study when you were in Washington? Business. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: So you're kind of like a lot of people like myself. I'm not doing what I went to college for. So that's kind of good that you are doing that. How long have you been here at Amazon? Speaker 2: I've been at Amazon for a little over 11 years. Speaker 3: 11 years. Speaker 2: Awesome. Awesome. I think it's pretty rare to see 11 years at Amazon, but I think what's even more rare is that I've been with U.S. global selling for the entire time. Speaker 1: Excellent. Speaker 3: So what's your journey been like in that department? Speaker 2: Well, I started as an account executive and came in, and actually at the time, we were recruiting or talking to and pitching EU-based sellers to launch onto Amazon.com, and this is going back to 2014, 2015. Now, we actually are working with sellers that are here based in the U.S. to help them expand to our global stores. I focused on US to EU, but we also will launch into Brazil, Australia, Japan, Mexico, pretty much any of our worldwide stores. Speaker 3: You know, I think when we think about expanding globally, you know, there's a number of issues or obstacles that people might be scared of. I think one of the big ones is the L word is logistics. You have a logistics background at all and can you talk a little bit about that? Speaker 2: Yeah, actually I spent five years at a company called Expeditors. It was a global logistics company similar to UPS and FedEx and really just helping shippers get their products all over the world. And I focused on our air export division. Which was extremely eye-opening. I mean, just starting logistics and seeing that process, you know, the entire door-to-door from, you know, from manufacturer to the exporter, all the different milestones and checkpoints along the way to get that product or whatever that is, you know, to the end customer, you know, wherever in the world. Speaker 3: So, your team helps sellers, brands from the United States expand mainly to EU. What exactly does this help involve? Speaker 2: Expanding globally, we do know is complicated and complex. A lot of milestones, a lot of steps to it. And I think within that challenge, not the goal to make our team obsolete and solve every single problem that there is, but our challenge and mission became how do we make global selling accessible to all sellers of any size really. And I think there's a lot of things that have gone into that. And one, I think that Amazon, and we've done really well, is creating a consistent experience for selling globally. So, whether you're on Amazon.com or in the UK or Germany or Japan or Australia, wherever, you know, Seller Central is designed to work really the same way. So, how you manage your listings and create new listings, your detail pages, you know, what goes into those, you know, the sponsor products and promotions, ads, those types of things to help, you know, actually get eyes and conversion, discoverability and all those things. That's all like the day-to-day is all pretty consistent regardless of where you're selling and we've made you know progress with FBA and our build international listings tool and you know even just the linked accounts dashboards and those types of things. That's I think is still a Our mission is how do we continue to improve this process, continue to make it easier for sellers to expand globally and encourage sellers and give sellers the confidence that, yeah, It's a consistent experience. You can trust that with Amazon and then you can take the similar strategy and tactics that made you successful on your local store, domestic store, and apply those to your global store and have confidence that those are still the right tools and tactics and strategy. Speaker 3: You mentioned you get a lot of feedback from customers and that's what's helped you make the process somewhat seamless because you know what they're going through. Talk to me a little bit about that feedback process. What have you learned? Speaker 2: We're in a very unique position as U.S. global selling because we are talking and working with these sellers on a daily basis. We're collecting valuable feedback, pain points and frictions and what's working well and what's not working so well, what other things that sellers will need or want to see and have Amazon actually build. We're front lines. We're getting that feedback every single day. I remember when I started, I thought to myself how valuable this is to be able to be in the front lines and talking with sellers and working with them directly on growing their business. We need to obviously do more with that. And we created this program called the Feedback Ecosystem. And this is maybe three years into when I started working at Amazon. And so what we decided to do is, and this is kind of the first time I actually think I saw this really happening at Amazon, is collecting that feedback and seller anecdotes, aggregating that, and then categorizing it to where we can actually use it to go and try to figure out, okay, how to improve, what tools We're programs that sellers are using to improve those, where the pain points are, where the frictions are, where things are potentially broken. I think one specific example that I'd kind of like to talk about today and bring up a couple of times is we continue to get feedback from sellers that they need more resources, more information on how to get through the different milestones or checkpoints to expand globally. And even product demand, like the products that I sell here in the U.S., are those going to be successful in the U.K. or Germany? They didn't know. They wanted to know what the demand for their product was. We didn't really have a good answer for that at the time. We kept hearing that feedback over and over and over again, and a lot of that helped what we ended up building, which is our Sell Globally workflow, Sell Globally experience, which is all in Seller Central. And that's different milestones and checkpoints throughout the expansion process, and it's all done by what store you're looking to go to. And then there's our Marketplace Guidance Tool, or MPG, and that's the demand indicators, the category insights, related costs to expanding to UK or Germany, whatever market or whatever store you're looking at launching into. It's been a really successful tool, a really powerful tool. A lot of sellers are using it, one that we're really excited about. It's not the final product yet and we will continue to provide feedback based on what we're hearing from sellers with those product teams to continue to improve and innovate to help make things easier for sellers moving forward. Speaker 3: So which of those two tools should someone go to first? If, hey, I'm only selling in the United States right now. Let me go to the Amazon Seller Central search bar. Should I look for Sell Globally or what's the other one you just mentioned? Speaker 2: Marketplace Guidance. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. So the Marketplace Guidance tool is actually within the Sell Globally workflow. Speaker 3: So I should just search Sell Globally and then go right in there. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And then you can get all of your demand indicators and insights on the category insights. And you can see there's even unit forecasts and revenue forecasts as well. And all by, you know, specific to the marketplace that is essentially or that your target store. Speaker 3: So, you know, this is important because I think during during, you know, lockdown and different things, a lot of people were affected. And, you know, some people's, you know, supply chains in the United States got kind of locked down. And there, you know, some some revenue, you know, went to zero if I'm only selling on one platform. But those who are global, who had already expanded global, they weren't as affected. And especially nowadays, in this, you know, 2025, 2026, I think it's so important to diversify where your products are being sold. You don't have to like make a specific product. For each different country, you can just sell the same one. You know, like sometimes, of course, if you have supplements, you know, maybe you have to make a different label or something like that, but you can use the same ASIN. And, you know, imagine instead of just selling in one country, you're selling in 10 or 15, which by the way, I'm going to test myself and you'd be my mentor here, my quiz taker. I want to see if I know all the EU marketplaces. I remember there was a core five, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy. And then now there's a whole bunch of new ones that have come on lately. For a long time, I just remember there was only those five. Sweden. I think Ireland was one of the newer ones. Netherlands. Poland. Am I missing anything? Is it nine? Speaker 2: Belgium. Speaker 3: Oh, the Belgium, yeah, I forgot all about Belgium. So there's 10 then. And is that, so your team is helping with those. Are there any other ones in the, like, I guess that's called the EU token or whatever that are loosely related to EU, not necessarily EU, like the Turkey one or others? Speaker 2: Yeah, there's Turkey. And then obviously with our global selling, like there's, you know, the marketplaces all around the world as well. And one of the benefits of, you know, launching in those other EU stores is that it's not just The, you know, customers are consumers within those countries that are able to access those products. You actually get access from consumers across 30 EU countries that can go to those EU stores and purchase product and still all fulfilled, you know, through FBA. Speaker 3: All right. So I gave some reason about why our audience should definitely expand globally. Can you expand, expand, pun intended, on that a little bit? What are some other reasons to motivate this audience to, like, say, hey, guys, it's time to expand? Speaker 2: I think talking to sellers directly, sellers, you can do this. Sellers are doing this every single day. Brains are taking their products and their brain global every single day. I've worked with some of the largest sellers. On Amazon, some small sellers as well, sellers that were, you know, the contact I was working with was, it was just a part-time job for them at the time. And they kind of hit that lightning in a bottle product and brand and, you know, it just blew up from there. And then we, you know, they found their success here, you know, on Amazon.com. We helped them expand into the U.K. and then from the U.K. they kind of expanded out from there. And I think one of the other important parts to remember for a U.S. seller is that the global experience and global selling experience is designed to be consistent across every store, at least with, you know, how to run, you know, the day-to-day and all that. Speaker 3: Advertising, there's an image, there's a title, there's five bullet points, there's a description, there's A-plus content. Speaker 2: Exactly, exactly. So you can have confidence in taking, you know, the, you know, the strategy and, you Everything that you've applied here and made yourself, you know, brand successful on your, you know, amazon.com and use those as like a really great starting point to set yourself up for success in your, you know, global store. Speaker 3: I think, uh, in my quiz, uh, I got 10 countries or nine. You gave me the 10th there. So there's obviously more than 10 countries in Europe, but there's 10 Amazon stores in Europe. So, um, I, I just went to the billion dollar seller summit. Um, it was in, Estonia believe and then on my way there I took a night I'd never been to a Finland before so I'm there in Finland. I'm like, oh man, I need a new cable. Am I able to order even though there's no Amazon Finland am I still able to order and get that cable? Speaker 2: Yeah, and so if you're in now, it's over 30 countries where if you just go to the Amazon store and it'll take you to the local, the best store, kind of the best option for you to, you know, from wherever you're sitting for as long as that product is within our FBA and fulfillment centers, you can purchase that product and Amazon will still deliver that. So another kind of benefit to, you know, to go into the EU is, yes, not just the those, you know, the 10 stores that have access to, you know, to those products. It's, you know, consumers across 30 different countries in the EU. Speaker 3: And so it's like exported from FBA, but then like maybe delivered by local carriers or something like that. Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. So, I'm selling in US. We've got them sold to go to EU. What's the path? Do I need to go all 10 of these stores at once or do I just pick that core five or can I do it one by one? What's your suggested path? Speaker 2: Yeah, majority of the sellers that we work with, they will just start with the UK at first. It's English to English, so that makes at least the language barrier a little bit easier. And then as they're getting more comfortable with their sales in the UK and the tools and the fulfillment and logistics of getting product over to our FCs, they'll start to expand out from there into Germany, which would be the second largest, and so on until they get into EU5. Speaker 3: They have funny English over there. I hope I don't offend anybody of my English listeners, but there's funny words like nappy. I think of nappy like I think of my hair sometimes when I don't get a haircut. Over there, that means diaper and stuff like that. So that's where, shameless plug, that's where Helium 10 tools come in where we can see, hey, what are the ways that people search? Because I 100% agree, you should start with UK because for you English speakers, But don't just assume that they speak the same English as we here in the States. But then nowadays, we talk a little bit about AI. We have AI listening builders and things like that. I don't speak German. I know what the German keywords are, but hey, how do I craft a well-crafted German translated listening? Well, that's where Helium 10 can come in and help as well. Now, speaking of language differences, we talked about logistics differences. What are some other differences about selling in EU compared to selling it here in the United States? Speaker 2: There's definitely differences between selling in the US and the EU. We'll cover a couple of the house rules in the EU. So first, there's regulations and compliance. Europe has VAT, or Value Added Tax. So that's similar to a tax ID if you're here in the US, but works a little bit differently. The other important one to talk about briefly is product compliance. Just like how you're purchasing product here in the U.S., you want to make sure that that product, you want it to be safe. You want it to be within the rules and regulations and everything that the U.S. is looking to ensure whatever product is being purchased is safe for their consumers. Same thing in the EU. And Amazon is going to hold sellers accountable to make sure that they hold that bar in terms of compliance. And so I guess, you know, these are complex and can be complicated topics. Fortunately, we have our solution provider network program that is all vetted providers, providers that we've worked with, that we've added to this program. Sellers can go in and search for, you know, whatever the topic is that they're interested in learning about. I mean, language could be part of that or translations, which they'll need, obviously, in Europe as well. But yeah, tax, Logistics, product compliance, and so those providers are there who are the experts and will work with sellers directly to ensure compliance and selling properly globally. Speaker 3: And this is not something, guys, that you're like, all right, let me go ahead and set my inventory and then think about these things. You need to do it in the beginning. And one of those companies in the partner store that we at Helium 10 work a lot with is Avosk. Avosk has offices around the world and they really specialize in knowing, hey, what are the local laws and regulations and how do you set up, you know, they'll help you set up VAT. Actually, for those who are Helium 10 members, you have full access to a full course That we did with Avast inside of your Freedom Ticket program is called Expansion Ticket. We talk a lot more detail about some of these topics that Mike just mentioned here. I think, you know, you've mentioned FBA. Something that is unique to EU, just due to the structure of the continent, I guess you could say, is, or I guess it's kind of similar, like we have remote fulfillment here in the United States where I can, you know, have product in We're going to talk a little bit about Amazon USA, FBA, and then it can send to Canada and Brazil. But it's a little bit different, and it's something called Pan-EU. I've never used it before, but can you talk a little bit about Pan-EU? Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah. So with FBA, it does work somewhat similarly to the U.S. once your product is in our FCs. That's one of the requirements about selling in Europe is that, yeah, you have to have your inventory in the U.K. or in Germany, our fulfillment centers, to use FBA. So, just like you mentioned remote fulfillment, that also exists in Europe as well. And so, let's say you have your product stored in the UK. So, it's in our fulfillment centers there. You're selling on Amazon.co.uk and you want to expand into Germany. You can still use FBA to sell into Germany through remote fulfillment. So, once you launch your Germany store, You can actually, as long as that product is in our UK FCs, as soon as there's an order from a customer in Germany, we'll pull that product from the UK inventory and then ship it to that customer in Germany. And same with, you know, Italy or France. And one thing to think about is that, yeah, there's going to be longer lead times to delivery, obviously, just because of the distance. But it's still, you know, that listing in Germany still has that FBA, you know, prime tag, which, you know, I think is at least for me, shopping on Amazon, that's kind of where I always start is I click prime first and go from there. Now, yeah, PantyU. PantyU, I think, is one of the, like, the biggest program product launches that I've seen at Amazon. And our PantyU program It allows you to consolidate your logistics and shipping into one lane into Europe. Now, we've actually separated the UK and EU with Pan-EU, just post-Brexit, essentially. One of the requirements for having your product stored in a specific country is having a VAT for that country. So you have a VAT in Germany. You ship your product and store it in Germany. And as soon as you get a second VAT number, let's say for Italy, then all of a sudden you can unlock PANiU in both Germany and Italy, since you have VATs in both now. You can still just send all your product inventory into our German FCs, and then PANiU allows Amazon to kind of take over from there, get product as close to where demand, seasonality trends, special events, whatever's going on. And PANiU actually has changed to where when we first launched it, it was all or nothing. You had to get a register for seven VAT numbers, which takes a lot of time, a lot of admin effort to get all that done. But once you had your seven, then you could go PAN-EU. So they pretty much removed any of our new sellers and early on sellers in the EU from adopting PAN-EU. Now we've transitioned it to more of an a la carte model. So yeah, like I had mentioned, as you pick up those VAT numbers, kind of move at your own pace, you can enable and launch Pan-EU across those EU countries. Speaker 3: All right, circling back to that Sell Globally workflow that everybody out there is about to do, what else did we leave out? Speaker 2: Well, I think there's a lot of improvements that are coming with our Sell Globally product. And so we've talked about if you think, you know, like the marketplace guidance tool. And all those demand indicators and category insights, that's great. That's all still there. And we're, you know, continue to improve that portion of that product as well. We are also really looking at how we can leverage, you know, different AI, you know, powered tools and enhancements within SellGlobally to create, you know, maybe more of a personalized experience for every single seller. So we'll, you know, continue to build on that experience and that SellGlobal experience. Like, you know, that's not going anywhere. That'll be there to stay. Speaker 3: Okay, so any final resources you can talk about where our audience is going to be able to even get more help with expanding globally? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think just quickly after this Accelerate event, we are hosting a Ask Amazon event that is focused on global selling, and that's on September 23rd, and it's a full-day event. Now, this Ask Amazon event, it all takes place in the seller forums, and there's a QR code that I think we can share, and so you can register for that, and you can pretty much ask any question you want about global selling. We'll focus on the EU and LATAM stores as well. We'll have account managers that are ready to answer the questions throughout that day, so it's really live for, I think, eight hours or so. And that doesn't go anywhere. That forum's post will stick around for a while, so you can always go back and reference and look back at questions or other questions that sellers have asked. That's one, so plug that live event coming on Tuesday the 23rd. I'll also include a few links of just how to get started looking at the differences between the U.S. and the EU, selling globally, and all the things that we talked about of VAT or the sell globally experience and marketplace guidance. That's all there, a great place to start. Take a look and let's start selling. Speaker 3: Awesome. So for any of you who are just listening to this in your car, once you get to your house, just check the description below or if you're watching this on YouTube, the links will be right in the description below. And even if you're listening to this after the 23rd, what he's talking about still should be there. You'll be able to go to the Amazon seller forums and be able to access it. So thank you so much for this. I've been delaying this for years, my expansion on my own store. So now I'm like, okay, I'm being put on blast here. I'm interviewing somebody, telling everybody what to do. I haven't even done it myself. So I'm telling you guys right now, by the end of this year, I will be in Europe with my coffin shelf or any of my other products. That are going to be appropriate. I'm going to use the Sell Global tool and Helium 10 as well to make sure that there's demand for my products. But if you see me next year and you see that I am not in Europe, you can give me a slap on the face or something because I'm committing right now with him as a witness here that I am going to expand globally. So thank you so much for taking the time and helping our audience. And maybe next year, let's talk about what's new with your team. Speaker 2: Love it. Thank you for having me.