The Benefits of a Pan-European Amazon Account Setup

In the world of online retail, structuring sales accounts is a crucial element for success. This also applies to Amazon. Particularly at the European level, companies often face a decision of far-reaching significance: Should they build multiple independent Amazon accounts for various subsidiaries or sales companies, or instead use a single pan-European account? Or operate a vendor and seller account? Or perhaps a mix of both as a hybrid strategy?

In various consulting projects over the past years, I've encountered clients who either planned to build a Europe-wide network of Amazon accounts or already had a grown construct of a mix of vendor and multiple seller accounts and were unhappy with it.

Often, country-specific sales structures dictate to companies which entity is allowed to take over the business in which marketplace country. Existing contractual structures should be transferred as precisely as possible to the Amazon world. Why such a construct endangers a brand's success on Amazon, I want to explain step by step in the following.

Amazon Requires Specialized Knowledge

Those who want to be successful on Amazon need one thing above all: specialized knowledge. Amazon is versatile and complex at the same time. Amazon also offers no universal guide. Almost every day, new features are rolled out.

Entrusting an Amazon account to employees who are untrained or inexperienced would probably be a strategically poor decision. Knowledge building does happen through "learning on the job," but especially at the beginning of collaboration with Amazon, important decisions need to be made that have long-term effects and high risks. Additionally, problems often lie in areas that require years of experience. I could provide countless examples for this that anyone who has been dealing with Amazon for a longer time could easily supplement.

Let's establish the following at this point: It takes years for Amazon specialists to emerge, who moreover never stop learning.

Creating Value Instead of Redundancy

Employees in your organization who deal with Amazon's systems daily create value. You make mistakes, gather experiences, and learn. Therefore, this knowledge should be bundled in a small team that dedicates itself full-time to Amazon topics. It should not be distributed across many different heads who also have to take care of the day-to-day business of sales or marketing. Even worse if it's spread across different companies in different countries. There may be spatial as well as language barriers.

This way, no specialists emerge who build comprehensive knowledge, but rather isolated talents and redundancy, as different people work on the same tasks to find lengthy individual solutions but can never benefit from each other.

How often have we already had the situation where employees spend a long time dealing with problems that someone else had to solve recently, but they didn't know about each other. Often the right solution path is found through pure trial and error. Amazon knowledge must be centrally documented and knowledge transfer ensured through regular training, testing, and exchange of employees.

In short: In teams we work and learn faster.

Building a Simple European Account Setup

No one likes to deal with the following questions: Who should manage which Amazon account? Who holds administrative sovereignty over security-relevant access? Who provides sub-accounts for employees? Who removes users who leave the company from the system again?

In complex account setups, there are usually grown structures from my experience that were never properly questioned.

My account managers are used to logging in and out of numerous seller and vendor accounts daily with various passwords and 2-factor authentications. This must work smoothly, securely, and location-independently, even from home office. Would your team be able to do this with multiple accounts?

A seller account is always also a Europe-wide usable account. Besides the "German" Amazon account for Amazon.de, there are further linked markets for all of Europe. Amazon will also always strive to synchronize offers across multiple marketplaces. Additionally, customers can have goods sent to any country. Through shipping and export settings, you can control as a seller which customers can buy on which marketplace and where goods may be exported.

It's important to understand the complexity behind it. With each additional Amazon account and each new hierarchical level, further complex setups and new possibilities for errors and questions arise, the scope of which should not be underestimated.

Here's a small example from a past client project: A product, let's say a lamp, is sold on Amazon.de and Amazon.fr. It's sold directly to Amazon by the manufacturer from Germany. The manufacturer has both a vendor agreement and a seller account through which the lamp is also offered in Germany and France. In Germany, the product is sold in self-shipping and through Fulfillment by Amazon (i.e., the same shipping method as the vendor). In France, goods are only offered with self-shipping. Additionally, a French subsidiary of the manufacturer sells the goods on Amazon.fr and Amazon.de in self-shipping.

Amazon itself also offers the goods on amazon.fr, which they purchased in Germany. Can you still follow me? For illustration:

Consequence: There are four offers of the same product on Amazon.de and three on amazon.fr competing for the Buy Box. The manufacturer has created a competitive situation for itself. Keep this thought in mind, I'll come back to it when it comes to content, logistics, advertising, monitoring, and performance.

In summary: One offer per marketplace is a setup to strive for.

Content and Writing Rights

The content displayed on the product detail page such as texts, images, or A+ Content is fed into the system through the various sellers of a product and their Amazon accounts. Content can be submitted to Amazon through each seller or vendor account. All content is linked to the ASIN of the respective product. Amazon has the not easy task of selecting the appropriate content for display on Amazon from multiple providers.

Here the saying "Too many cooks spoil the broth" fits very well. Because Amazon usually picks out the "cook" who sells the most of the product and displays their content.

Brand owners thus not only have the challenge of feeding one truth per product through a single account, but also ensuring that this account ideally sells the most of the product. This becomes difficult when resellers play a significant role. Ultimately, Amazon tools like the Amazon Brand Registry (you need more knowledge here: Then get my free Amazon Brand Registry Whitepaper) can help here to display content as a brand wishes. Nevertheless, practice shows that it can be extremely strenuous to unite content from multiple sources or to deposit it as "one truth."

Conclusion: Fewer accounts also mean less hassle about writing rights.

Creating New Products

Similar to content, rules also apply for product creation. Always create your product on Amazon first with all the necessary data before presenting it, for example, in the purchasing catalog for wholesale and retail. This ensures that the initial data of your product is correct and all resellers can use it. This way, resellers don't even get the idea of contributing their own unwanted content or even hijacking your EAN to use it for other products. Because building on the "green field" is also significantly easier on Amazon, as is well known. Once something is "broken," you have a lot of work to straighten out your Amazon listing again.

Conclusion: Always create new products on Amazon first.

Logistics

In consulting projects, I repeatedly notice that customers make the important decision about which shipping route a product is sold on Amazon dependent on internal factors. The existing ERP system or the utilization of in-house logistics are often the main drivers of the decision whether to sell as vendor, seller, or broker (Looking for a broker? Contact me), in self-shipping or with FBA. Local sales companies of the manufacturer should then not infrequently also sell their own inventory so that everything can be correctly allocated.

What is neglected is what would actually be the best solution for the customer and Amazon for a product. Decisive for a decision should primarily be shipping speed and shipping costs for the customer. Have you ever evaluated how important it is to your customers to receive their product at short notice? (You shouldn't rely on your gut feeling here, but rather determine based on data what difference shipping speed and possibly charged shipping costs make for your customers). Only in the second step should the costs for storage, pick and pack, packaging, shipping, and returns be considered and compared. For FBA, paid storage and shipping costs also play a role.

Conclusion: Align your shipping solution with customers and not with the company.

Excursus: Buy Box

If there are multiple offers for one and the same product, they meet on the product detail page. However, only one (or perhaps a second) offer is pre-selected by Amazon for customers in the so-called Buy Box. Most customers buy the pre-selected product because they often don't even know that there are other providers. Who receives the Buy Box award depends on who convinces with the lowest price, fastest shipping, and best account performance.

You can determine selling prices yourself as a seller. Those who sell to Amazon (vendor) cannot directly influence the product price, Amazon takes care of this. So in my previously mentioned example, vendor and seller offers are in a price target conflict for the Buy Box. It can be assumed that products shipped by Amazon (vendor or seller with FBA) show the same shipping speed (assuming they are in the same Amazon warehouse).

In self-shipping, with price parity across the various offers, another target conflict for the Buy Box arises. The fastest shipping can even beat an FBA offer. So the price remains as the essential criterion to win the Buy Box.

Finally, performance also plays an essential role (we'll come back to this later). With performance, so much in advance, essentially the adherence to service promises by the seller is meant. But it can be assumed that Amazon itself has the best performance, followed by seller accounts that ship a lot and especially through FBA.

You see, various offers for the same product lead to a complex fight for the Buy Box. Amazon itself might feel compelled to offer a cheaper price as a vendor than the seller accounts. A not to be underestimated problem with multiple accounts is that these don't work with each other, but in the worst case against each other. The Amazon algorithm considers the offers of individual accounts as competing. This can lead to the Buy Box being hidden for all and in a setup with a vendor account even cause price erosion or significant price increases.

Disclaimer: How exactly the Buy Box works is, by the way, Amazon's secret. Many factors play a role here. Exceptions in the display don't confirm any rule.

Conclusion: Set up the account setup so that your offers don't hinder each other in the Buy Box.

Advertising

Now you've learned how the Buy Box works on Amazon and can understand that Amazon Advertising is only successful if you've won the Buy Box. Because the advertising formats Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display require a won Buy Box to be displayed at all.

With multiple accounts offering the same items, it can therefore happen that your advertising doesn't get a chance because the other account has just won the Buy Box. But it can get even worse: If different accounts were to bid on advertising for the same product with the same keywords, this would lead to your bids outbidding each other and thus unnecessarily driving up the costs of your advertising.

So those who operate with multiple accounts should decide for each product with which account it should be advertised.

A central advantage of a pan-European account also lies in the central control of advertising from one marketplace. Successful advertising on Amazon needs two essential things:

1. Products that are continuously sold
2. A critical mass of customers who perceive your offer so that the Amazon algorithm is even put in a position to display ads in a targeted manner. Additionally, relevant conclusions can only be drawn from your campaigns to optimize them with a certain statistical population.

If you want to build a comprehensive campaign structure, this will only be successful in an orderly account setup.

So regarding advertising, you have the goal: Advertise similar products in one account.

Monitoring

An account manager has the task, among many other topics, of monitoring everything that happens on Amazon. Starting with content and price changes, ensuring sufficient inventory, to managing promotional activities (deals) and advertising.

In one of my client projects, a team of two employees had to manage and monitor a vendor account and four seller accounts, each operating on up to 5 marketplaces, with 3,000 active SKUs. So four different accesses. An enormous challenge for the small team.

Since many of the products were offered across multiple marketplaces, sales and revenue analysis was equally more complex, comparing revenues on an ASIN basis across all products. Reports from all accounts and marketplaces had to be regularly aggregated and then analyzed. With a vendor account in the setup, it was incomparably more complex because here you wanted to look at the revenue and sales from Amazon with the customer and not that of the company with Amazon. (You find this exciting and have interest in such an ABC analysis for complex account setups? Then contact me).

That monitoring doesn't get easier with the help of tools in such a complex setup, I'll tell you later.

Important for you: You save yourself an enormous amount of work in evaluation and monitoring in a PAN-EU setup.

Performance

Amazon measures many performance factors for sellers to ensure that topics like storage, shipping, and compliance run as Amazon specifies. But customer feedback (customer rating of purchasing an item) or voice of the customer (customer opinions on returns) also count toward an account's performance.

Those who sell a lot and do good work in terms of service and shipping can collect points with a "clean slate" at Amazon. Should problems arise, it helps if you've done good work before.

If you use Amazon's storage and shipping for your items, you need a steady flow of items, otherwise there's a risk that Amazon will either limit storage space or, if the goods don't turn fast enough, turn the price screw and demand higher fees for storage.

But performance is also important for the Buy Box. With better performance, you can win the Buy Box more easily.

Ultimately, factors from various areas count together and form an overall picture of an account. Each country market has its own performance that needs to be actively and regularly monitored. In case of problems, product or in extreme cases account suspension threatens.

Conclusion: With each additional account, complexity increases and your account performance will suffer.

Integration of External Systems

When using multiple accounts, integration with external systems such as monitoring and advertising tools, ERP or PIM systems becomes complex and quickly confusing.

Few "modular tools" are prepared, for example, to pull data from various accounts or send it back divided to the same ones. Or being able to evaluate data from multiple vendor or seller accounts in a common dashboard is not trivial. Then a technical individual solution is usually necessary, the implementation of which can be time-consuming and extremely costly.

This makes monitoring and comparison of sales and sales figures difficult. A single PAN-EU account, on the other hand, enables clearer and simpler integration of these systems. External analysis and monitoring tools such as AMALYTIX are already prepared to evaluate a PAN-EU account ASIN-specifically but cross-country.

You like data automation? Create a simple setup that external tools can work with.

A PAN-EU Account

Essential advantages of a pan-European Amazon setup over multiple independent accounts are certainly an efficient and centralized structure.

A pan-European account offers significant advantages: It reduces the complexity of account management and logistics, enables consistent brand presentation, and facilitates monitoring of sales and marketing activities.

By bundling resources and expertise in one team, companies can react more effectively to market changes and utilize synergies. Central account management improves content control and ensures uniform product presentations across all European marketplaces. This leads to an optimized Buy Box strategy, more effective advertising, and better performance monitoring.

Additionally, efficiency is increased by reducing redundant structures and simplified integration into external systems. Overall, a pan-European Amazon setup enables a coherent, strategic alignment and strengthens the competitiveness of companies in the dynamic online retail environment.

Here's a brief summary of the 11 things you should take away from this article:

1. It takes years for Amazon specialists to emerge, who moreover never stop learning
2. In teams we work and learn faster
3. One offer per marketplace is a setup to strive for
4. Fewer accounts also mean less hassle about writing rights
5. Always create new products on Amazon first
6. Align your shipping solution with customers and not with the company
7. Set up the account setup so that your offers don't hinder each other in the Buy Box
8. Advertise similar products in one account
9. You save yourself an enormous amount of work in evaluation and monitoring in a PAN-EU setup
10. With each additional account, complexity increases and your account performance will suffer
11. Create a simple setup that external tools can work with

Do you need help analyzing or restructuring your account setup? Does all this overwhelm you and perhaps an Amazon broker model would be more suitable? Contact us and we'll arrange a free expert call!