At Amazon, we invest heavily in a community of over 900,000 successful European independent sellers, authors, content creators, delivery providers, developers and IT solution providers that partner with us.
small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) continue to account for more than 50% of everything we sell in our online stores, and we are always innovating to enable them to grow their businesses.
To date, European SMBs selling on Amazon have created over 550,000 jobs to run their online businesses. We also provide logistics, tools, services, programs and training to help them succeed – an investment of approximately €2.8 billion in 2020 in Europe.
We want to make it easy for anyone with a great product idea to quickly and easily start selling online and expand their business beyond their region. As a result, over 40,000 European SMBs selling on Amazon surpassed €100,000 in sales, and over 3,000 surpassed €1 million in sales for the first time in 2020.
SMB Community Report highlights
The 2021 European SMB Community Report demonstrates the successes and entrepreneurial spirit of the SMBs partnering with Amazon. It also highlights how we support around 185,000 small and medium businesses selling on Amazon. In 2020, these businesses sold more than 1.8 billion products in our stores.
In 2020, European SMBs had access to Amazon customers worldwide and achieved €12.5 billion in export sales. The top five categories from which customers around the world purchased products sold by SMBs were home, health and personal care, toys, beauty and apparel.
“Every day, we partner with thousands of small and medium-sized businesses and help them expand their businesses beyond their regions,” said Xavier Flamand, Director, EU Seller Services at Amazon. “These businesses are able to quickly and easily sell their products online, connecting with millions of customers around the world. We will continue to innovate for small and medium-sized businesses to help deliver a great shopping experience for our customers.”
Every day, we partner with thousands of small and medium-sized businesses and help them expand their businesses beyond their regions,
AfroRicci is a company selling natural products for wavy, curly and Afro hair based in Milan, Italy. Alice Edun, CEO, thinks that “Amazon’s showcase dedicated to Made in Italy is a wonderful opportunity for the visibility and promotion of local products of our country’s small businesses, which should be discovered both in Italy and abroad. Thanks to my brand, AfroRicci, I am proud to contribute to the enhancement of the Italian economy, especially in this difficult time for all of us.”
Mira Valentin, author of fantasy books based in Germany, is extremely enthusiastic about KDP. “At the beginning of my career, I was advised by experienced self-publishers to offer my e-books exclusively on Amazon and include them in the Kindle Unlimited Program. That was a very good advice—I wouldn’t want to change anything in the system.”
Accelerator programs
COVID-19 has created a number of challenges for SMBs, and some of them have adapted their businesses by selling online for the first time. In response to the impact of the pandemic, we launched new training programs including the Amazon Small Business Accelerator in the UK, Quickstart Online in Germany, Despega in Spain, Accelera con Amazon in Italy, and Accelerateur du Numerique in France. These have helped thousands of SMBs sell online.
