Europe was always a natural region for Plugable to expand to, because of its mature economy and its size. “As you’re looking at expanding outside of the US, the European marketplace is the next biggest market that’s culturally close and covered really well by Amazon,” Bernie says.
For him, Amazon was the obvious path to begin selling in Europe. “It’s never been possible to reach the globe so easily, before the creation of these global marketplaces and Amazon’s fulfillment globally,” he says. “Amazon already has a well-established customer base there, so if I’m able to get the product launched in Germany, I’ve got a huge audience of consumers who are already used to buying on Amazon, who are already searching on Amazon, who are going to come to my products.”
Plugable began selling on Amazon.co.uk in 2011, before expanding to sell across Amazon’s German, French, Italian, and Spanish marketplaces shortly thereafter.
“Even though we think of Europe as a collection of countries, it’s actually one big market that I can go after all at once using Amazon’s services,” Bernie says of selling across the continent. “Amazon has focused on unifying the process, so I have one place to log in, one common set of services from Amazon to deal with.”