The Amazon Strategist Show

Unlock Amazon's European Market: Compliance Secrets They Don't Want You To Know!

• Season 3 • Episode 81

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John speaks with Amazon expert Alex Karagiannis, Founder & CEO of Lezzat, about his journey from being an Amazon seller to founding his agency. They discuss the differences between the US and EU markets, compliance challenges for US sellers looking to expand into Europe, and strategies for launching products in these new marketplaces. Alex emphasizes the importance of understanding local regulations, VAT requirements, and the potential for growth in the European market. He also shares insights on leveraging existing reviews from the US to facilitate product launches in Europe.

Takeaways:

  • UK is often the first stop for US sellers due to language similarities.
  • Compliance in Europe involves various regulations, including VAT and local language requirements.
  • Sellers should assess competitors' packaging to understand compliance needs.
  • Amazon EU is a growing market with opportunities for expansion.
  • Launching in Europe can be easier with existing reviews from the US market.
  • Understanding local regulations is crucial for successful market entry.
  • Budgeting for compliance costs is essential for new sellers in Europe.
  • Using Amazon Vine can help gather local reviews even with existing US reviews.

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Connect with Alex and Lezzat
Website: www.lezzat.co.uk
Email: info@lezzat.co.uk
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejohncavendish
LinkedIn: https://hk.linkedin.com/in/thejohncavendish

Know More About Seller Candy
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Speaker 1:

Sellers that are used to selling in the US. There's a limited amount of things that you can. Us is not going to grow anymore. It's Canada and Mexico. Yes, they are growing, but it has reached a point where it's not as if Amazon is growing more there. What happens in Europe is each country. We have more countries being added. So we had, for example, poland added Turkey. Next year we have Ireland being added.

Speaker 2:

So that's the very exciting thing to see on this side is you start your journey today, but then it's also something that keeps on. And welcome to season three of the Amazon Strategy Show. The show that's all strategy, with no silver bullets, no magic tricks and no magic pills just real, practical strategies to grow your Amazon business. Today, I'm joined by none other than Alex Kariannis. He is an Amazon expert with over 13 years in marketing and eight years as an Amazon seller. He's helped over 500 brands, including major household and S&P 500 companies, grow their sales on Amazon globally. Known for his knowledge in Amazon EU, alex shares valuable strategies for brand growth, leveraging his experience as an Amazon seller and with a solid foundation. So, alex, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1:

Thank you very much, John. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for being here and, as a fellow global citizen, I hear you're dialing in from where now, where at the moment.

Speaker 1:

Well, today I'm in Athens, Greece. Our headquarters are in Reading in the UK.

Speaker 2:

Nice. Yeah, my mum used to live in Reading.

Speaker 1:

Random fact, nobody cared about for me.

Speaker 2:

I'm also in Vietnam at the moment, where I'm based most of the time, so we were talking before we started recording about. You were a seller and then you started your agency, which has had lots of success. How did you get into selling originally?

Speaker 1:

Well, it's a very interesting story. It all happened at a time where I got laid off from a previous company was working for in Bristol in the UK, which is a very popular city, and while I was trying to figure out what the next steps would be, I one friend actually told me about a priest over in US that was selling Tupperware, like what you do for your food, and he was making six million dollars on Amazon USA. And I'm like, hold on a minute, like I, I should know this stuff. I mean, I've started business, so why not let's try and learn amazon, long story short, did the course, started my first product and then that that was successful, started growing it and then I realized that maybe there might be other companies that actually need some support of the whole Amazon thing, because it's not as easy as people think when you start selling. So that's when that was essentially created yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 2:

And which course did you do out of interest?

Speaker 1:

so it was one from Theo I don't remember her surname, but but it was one of those genuine, true value courses. It was less than $20, the whole thing. It was not one of those scammy or whatever ones, etc. And it was a person who used to do e-commerce back in the day, when it was with envelopes and physical mail all the way to today, and knows Amazon, knows job shipping, etc. So it was a very, very good course. Yeah, it was very, very helpful very interesting.

Speaker 2:

And then, how did you come up with the name Lazat?

Speaker 1:

well, Lazat is essentially a name. It means in Farsi. It means derive pleasure. So I said, if I'm going to start a company, I might as well have fun doing it. So that's why it's named Lezat.

Speaker 2:

Oh cool, and are you Iranian originally?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, half. Yes, my mom, yeah, yeah, she's from there.

Speaker 2:

But I was born and raised in Greece.

Speaker 1:

Sorry.

Speaker 2:

One of my best friends is Iranian, so I'll have to ask him.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, he's going to know it for sure. Lezat is a very popular word used in Farsi. Very cool.

Speaker 2:

Awesome, so you're a seller. When did you start the agency?

Speaker 1:

When did you start the agency? The agency a bit over six years ago is when I started it, and essentially we are a fully remote agency and we do A to Z, in essence, anything an Amazon seller would need, and it started, as I mentioned, trying to solve the most common issues when it comes to open your Amazon account how to list your products, all the way to design, and nowadays, obviously, there's additional problems that come with selling on Amazon, whether it's expanding globally, etc. So it really is an A to Z and it's fueled by a lot of experience that I have as an Amazon seller.

Speaker 2:

And a lot of my colleagues also are Amazon sellers as well. Awesome. So you originally started with your big focus on Amazon UK and Europe. Is that?

Speaker 1:

right. The majority of our business is in this side of the Atlantic. Yes, we do have clients in the US as well, but the majority of our business is over in the UK and EU.

Speaker 2:

Nice, and how does the UK and Europe differ from the US when you're looking at it as a single marketplace, I guess for the UK and for across all of Europe.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, so well. So I would say, for any US sellers looking to go across, uk is usually the first stop, mainly because of the language. It's much easier to just move all the content and everything across. And then EU you start. Obviously, more complexities come in when it comes to translations and packaging and laws and regulations, etc. Laws and regulations, etc. But with it also comes a new, like a chessboard, as I like to call it, because sellers that are used to selling in us there's a limited amount of things that you can.

Speaker 1:

Us is not going to grow anymore. It's canada and mexico. Yes, they are going, but it has reached a point where it's not as if amazon is growing more there. What happens in Europe is each country. We have more countries being added. So we had, for example, poland added Turkey. Next year we have Ireland being added. So that's the very exciting thing to see on this side is you start your journey today, but then it's also something that keeps on growing and growing and using Amazon as a way to expand your D2C business, essentially into Europe.

Speaker 2:

Love it. And you mentioned, I think, compliance, and that's probably one of the biggest things that's changed in the last few years. So, if someone's a US seller and they're looking to move into Europe, what should they be looking out for in terms of things they need to have across all of Europe?

Speaker 1:

really, if you could take us through a kind of journey, there's a lot of things, so I'm just going to keep it at a high level, but obviously anyone listening is happy to reach out to me etc and get some free advice, by all means. So, first things first. It's obviously very different saying that I sell, let's say, a T-shirt, and I sell, let's say, a supplant and I want to start selling in Europe. For obvious reasons, there's different complexes that come with it, right? So the next, if we take a simple example, you want to look at first of all the legislative side of things. So if it's something that is consumed, it's much more difficult. If it's not consumed is less difficult. For example, then you have the language barrier, so you need to have, obviously, fat number, which is your tax number, wherever your products are stored. So, for example, a company that wants to sell in an Amazon Germany, they install the products numbers in Germany. They have to have that number in Germany. Now that numbers take about three to four months right now because there's a backlog. It used to be six months two years ago, so it's kind of improving, but this is something to be aware of.

Speaker 1:

Trademarks is very important because you need to also expand your trademark from US to EU and UK. Then you need translation services, very important. The days where you can just put your product in Amazon Germany or in English and hope that it's going to sell well are gone. You need German language in Spain, spanish language and equally.

Speaker 1:

Then there's the compliance side, which has to do with your EORI number, your EU responsible person, an address in the EU, a telephone number in the EU, warnings in local language, recycling, what's called Lucid, which is another sort of compliance. So there's all of these small things. Some have big impact to sellers, some have less impact to sellers, depending on the type of product that they sell. I think one of the easiest and quickest way for people to just get some info is they could source one product from Amazon Europe that is a competitor, let's say, of theirs, and see how does the packaging look like, what does it write on it and that's it. That's a quick way for them to assess. But obviously, making the move, you need to do it professionally and according to the law and the compliance regulations.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that makes sense. That's a really good tip actually to order someone. Order another product very similar to yours from one of the European countries and hopefully it's legal and complies with all the markings.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you can see the reviews, how many bought. Even without using any of the tools that we all know in the Amazon space, you can still tell is this a good seller or not, right? So if it's a very good seller, they most likely have done their due diligence on that cool.

Speaker 2:

And then, once you actually comply with all this stuff, does someone check that you've complied with it, or does it? Are they kind of? Is it kind of like an honesty system until somebody flags you if you're not complying?

Speaker 1:

yes and no just the sheer volume of product that goes through Amazon. It's obviously normal for some things to go beneath the radar, right? But also Amazon has been enforcing more and more sort of checks on their portals that you comply with things. So, just to give you an example, a very, very common one is German law says if you're going to be bringing plastic into my country, you need to be paying for it or disposing of it effectively. Again, I'm not a licensed accountant, so this is my experience as an Amazon seller and what I see from clients.

Speaker 1:

But what happens is if your product is eco-friendly, you don't need to do anything for this, but if it's not, for example, then you need to pay, etc. And you go on an outside portal to get this certification, let's just call it. So therefore, amazon says I need you to give me that code before you're allowed to sell these products on Amazon Germany. So therefore, the compliance side of things happens somewhere on an environment outside of Amazon, and this is something that we see being enforced more and more in other countries. France is also doing the same, spain is introducing something similar, so it's just going to be the case that these are going to be more closely monitored and enforced on Amazon.

Speaker 2:

And it's going to be separate for every country. There's not some kind of central European way of doing this, because they're all separate. God love europe. Um, yeah, so yeah. And if so, if you're already selling in the us and you're thinking about expanding to europe, like, how would you evaluate whether it's a good product for different marketplaces in europe?

Speaker 1:

yeah. So obviously for us as an agency, we have tools that we can see market size. You know your total addressable market segment, and so we can very pinpoint this down to two big accuracy. But for people who don't have access to tools or don't want to use tools and they just want to just browse, or even on their phone, etc. Like what I would say is a quick way of assessing is just, and have a look for your main product, what's, what's happening UK, uk, what's happening in germany? Those are going to give you a good indicator of what, of how many sales.

Speaker 1:

Now, what I mean by this is you search, for example. Let's say you sell a eco-friendly water bottle, let's just say it. And then you go and search the same keyword in uk. How many come up? What's the price per different sizes? How many can you see they've bought? For example, because it's nowadays Amazon says how many. They bought more than a hundred, more than two hundred. Now, if you have some analytic tools but you can even download for free, great, because then you can run them and get some more actual data on this and then start basically doing your own assessment I would say so, your own kind of homework of what are the competitors? What price is it worth going there? Can I take what do the reviews say? Maybe even buying some of their products and assessing quality and before, obviously, making a more informed decision of going down the route of expanding into EU.

Speaker 2:

It's great to know that. And then for me personally because I haven't sold in the EU for a while, I haven't launched in the EU for a while what kind of overhead on compliance in terms of sales tax and VAT and just keeping compliant? Do you think somebody needs to budget if they're going to want to launch in Europe? How much per year or how much to launch?

Speaker 1:

This is going to depend on a few things, because obviously when you ship to UK, for example, you have a few fees. So you've got your import fees, you've got your VAT, you've got customs etc. What you pay, you pay zero percent, you pay 10, what is it? And so on. But a quick rule I would say and this is just a rule of thumb, I would say is you want to aim to have at best one-fifth, at worst one-fourth of your landing price be your rrp. So maybe I didn't say this correctly. So your cost of sending the products and landing in the country should be one fourth, at worst case scenario, of what you want to sell them on Amazon for. So just an example if you want to sell an eco-friendly water bottle, let's say, for 20 euro, you want it to land in your warehouse in Germany for five euro per piece and that's how normally you would budget for it.

Speaker 1:

That's a. That's a quick way. If you're in one-third, it's going to be very difficult. One below this is not pointing. Even discussing it now, it could be obviously the case that we say you know, as with anything, really, when you start selling on Amazon, the first few batches is about getting reviews, getting velocity, getting sales, local reviews. So maybe it's the case that right now it might be one third. So it might cost you seven euros to get this water bottle in Germany, but then if you go in a container it's going to drop, for example.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And so you, you know someone's come in, they've got the product in the us, they put it to europe. Um, they've got some stock in. Like how would you suggest that they launch across these different european marketplaces?

Speaker 1:

yeah, okay, so there's a. So there's a lot of homework that needs to be done and a lot of steps need to be done correctly. So, as I said, and we have noticed sometimes some people they don't understand how long it takes to get these VAT numbers, the bureaucratic side of things, how long it can take for some compliance things to happen. But, assuming this is all working well and it's under control, then obviously you want to look at your packaging. So your packaging has to have a local warning, local address, etc.

Speaker 1:

Stickers are work wonders for this case, or you can create a specific EU version of your packaging just for that. However, bear in mind you need to keep the same barcode because you would more certainly want to launch in EU with the reviews that you have on Amazon USA. Now, this applies for the majority of the products. Some, if it's especially like electrical goods, for example, with a plug, you cannot do it because US plug and EU plug is different. But 99% of the products you can use the same barcode, which means you can carry across the reviews with you. You would need to know your logistics, where to store the products, and then you need to have a launch strategy so you know your Amazon Vine, launching at a 50% discount your PPC all of those things being taken care of in its marketplace.

Speaker 2:

That's ideally how it's to go Cool, that makes a lot of sense. And then to actually do the launch, would you follow the same strategy you do in the US? Is there anything different when you want to start getting sales Because you've already got reviews? I guess if it's carried over the reviews, Does that make launching the product easier in these European markets?

Speaker 1:

You could say you've got a head start in the sense that you don't start with zero reviews. However, your BSR is not, so it's a chicken and egg situation kind of thing, where you do have the reviews but you don't have the ranking because of the BSR. So you might even have the brand presence, or also people might know you and not only the stars, but what people say in the reviews but not in that country, so maybe people cannot read it or understand it. You have to translate it. So it's that sort of thing, but it's really. It's definitely much easier to launch a product that has already has reviews in USA, to launch it in EU than just zero. There are some other things that are quite interesting, so you can do vine again, for example, to collect those new local reviews. So that's pretty interesting for each one of those countries.

Speaker 2:

So that is, um, yeah, that's just a tip, uh, tip for you so you can use vine, even though it's already got reviews in the us and it's showing reviews and ratings, you can reuse mine. It's a super good.

Speaker 1:

You can you can rewind if you want.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, exactly, love it if anyone's been listening, I think that's a good like brief guide of how to how to get into europe, and if anyone wants to find out more, do you have any other content they can consume for, like a more in-depth?

Speaker 1:

yeah, yeah. So first of all, they can. I'm always happy in uh to to when people reach out for information. So they can reach out to me for more info by all means. On our website we have more info. We have a dedicated page for this so you can find more info there. I would say that's probably the best place to go get all the information is website or reach directly to me by email or link.

Speaker 2:

I love it Cool, thank you. So we're going to get to the point of the episode where we're going to ask for your controversial take. So you know this is something we ask everyone. What's your most debatable or controversial opinion related to Amazon or the e-commerce industry?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think it's very obviously. I would say my take is linked and a lot with the conversation we just had. So when I started selling on Amazon for US sellers, amazon UK and EU, especially EU, was like no point in going. Why even go? Now it's like an extremely hot topic. So I would say the most controversial one is when people say that it's not worth selling on Amazon EU. I would say it's absolutely the future. It's absolutely where a lot of sellers are more and more looking at expanding. It keeps on growing and actually it's, in my opinion, one of the best ways to safeguard your future of your company. By expanding distributors, offline retailers, wholesalers etc. In other territories. Successful products can do very, very well on Amazon EU.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I would agree. I've seen some amazing success stories on Amazon Europe Awesome, cool. So if anyone does want to talk to you directly, what's the best way to follow you online and connect with you online?

Speaker 1:

what's the best way to follow you online and connect with you online? Yeah, so feel free to reach out to me on alexatlesatcouk, or on our website, lesatcouk, or on LinkedIn, any of those. Really, that's the best way.

Speaker 2:

I love it and it's been really interesting. I'm sure there's a lot of value taken from the audience here of how they can basically expand to Europe and why they should do it, and I would recommend either reaching out to Alex or researching yourself if your product can be successful in Europe, because you'd be surprised how underserved some markets can be in Europe and how, with the number of reviews you already have in the US, you could actually probably stand out, because some of these US sellers have 5,000, 10,000 reviews, which in Europe, in one single market, would be incredible.

Speaker 1:

Just one last thing to say, john, to interrupt. It's because it's more tightly monitored in terms of regulations also having things like hijackers or more competition or people stealing your listing, or it's a bit more difficult to do in Europe, so that's why it's a bit more difficult to enter, but also much safer ground to grow your business, just as a side note.

Speaker 2:

I love it and, as they always say, barriers to get in are a pain, but barriers to get in stop people from getting in behind you, unless you're Europe's borders, which maybe not In European joke there. But yes, thank you so much if you've been watching this episode, if you've liked it, please give us a thumbs up or rate us, because that helps us get up the rankings, and see you again next week for another episode of the Amazon Strategy Show. Thank you so much for being here.

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