On 28 October 2020, Amazon.se has officially launched and it is now the 7th Amazon marketplace in Europe. With customers in Sweden being able to purchase on Amazon.se and with a new market having opened for FBA sellers, we take a closer look on what information is already public, which VAT duties arise and what can be expected in the near future.
Antonia Klatt
Last Updated on 7 November 2020Amazon Marketplace #7: Amazon.se
Since last Wednesday, customers across Sweden can buy products on Amazon.se. After the introduction of Amazon.nl at the beginning of this year, Amazon.se is now the 7th Amazon marketplace in Europe.
Currently, there is a selection of 150 million products across more than 30 categories on the Swedish Amazon site. There are “tens of thousands of products from local Swedish businesses,” said Alex Ootes, Vice President of the European Expansion for Amazon, and the featured categories are for example Books, Consumer Electronics, Toys and Baby, and many more.
NOTE: Orders fulfilled by Amazon above a value of SEK 229 (~$26) are delivered free of charge!
Starting on the Swedish Amazon market
FBA sellers, especially those who sell with the Pan-EU Program, can now add the seventh marketplace in the Amazon Seller Central.
Then, simply visit the Amazon Services Europe site and click on start selling which will take you through the process of registering for a seller account. You will be able to benefit from the FBA and Pan-European FBA (Pan-EU) programs with domestic fees and offer your products to local customers.
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As this new marketplace is currently more like a language extension for the new market, the activation in the seller central should be enough to fully enable it. For some sellers, it was activated automatically by Amazon anyways. Just check your seller account!
How can you prepare your listings?
Amazon stated some time ago in an email to FBA sellers that the following steps should be considered to prepare product listings:
- “The Build International Listings (BIL) tool in Seller Central allows you to list your existing products on Amazon.se in bulk and save you valuable time. Go to Inventory , then choose Sell Globally . Within BIL, you can select the items you want to synchronise to Amazon.se and define the pricing rules.
- Then, your offers will be automatically translated to Swedish with BIL’s Machine Translation functionality, and listed on Amazon.se.
- Please note : When the BIL tool is active, it will regularly synchronise your existing listings and prices for all linked Seller Central accounts. Please check your preferred tool settings here.“
VAT duties in Sweden for FBA Sellers
Now let us talk about the fiscal and taxation side of the expansion to Sweden. The unified EU seller accounts enables activating/listing your products on the Swedish Amazon market but what does this mean in terms of VAT?
Basically, there are 2 reasons when online sellers have to register in an additional country for VAT purposes.
Reason 1: You have reached the annual VAT registration threshold.
Reason 2: You are storing goods in the respective country.
So, when importing to Sweden from abroad and reaching the annual threshold limit, a VAT registration in Sweden is mandatory anyways. However, most Amazon FBA sellers need to get additional VAT numbers because of storage when using Amazon’s warehouses.
Just like with the Dutch Amazon marketplace, products sold in Sweden are currently fulfilled from warehouses in other countries (e.g. Germany). Therefore, the goods are stored in Germany and you would need to get a German VAT number or, if you are already registered for VAT in Germany, nothing will change in terms of taxation.
NOTE: With Amazon putting more and more money into the infrastructure in Europe, it can be expected that building Amazon warehouses in Sweden or/and the Netherlands is only a matter of time. Actually, in Eskilstuna (near Stockholm), the first Swedish Amazon warehouse is already starting.
Every beginning is hard
As many people have already noticed, the start in Sweden was a bit bumpy, mainly due to bad and missing translations. Unfortunately, quite a few items were translated incorrectly, especially in the categories Video Games, Toys, Kitchenware and Underwear.
Further, when selecting the region in the seller central, Sweden was listed next to the flag of Argentina. Of course, something like that should not happen to one of the biggest companies in the world, but in the end, this will not do any harm to the success of Amazon.se. Let’s see what the new marketplace will bring.
Source: dailymail.co.uk
What to do now?
We would suggest that Amazon FBA sellers keep track on the development, especially if and when new warehouses are built. If this will be the case, additional VAT numbers will be needed and the whole Amazon FBA program will probably be adapted. Of course, we will keep you informed in our blog!