The map: marketplaces, one account, and the UK

Europe looks like a single market with several languages. For selling, that is roughly true: one account, one catalogue, customers in every country. For tax and product safety it is false in a way that costs money, because obligations follow the physical goods rather than the website they were bought from.

One account, several stores

An Amazon Europe account gives you access to the European stores from one login: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Belgium and Ireland among them. Listings can be created once and offered across stores, and Amazon can translate and match your offers between catalogues.

What the single account does not do is make you a single taxpayer. Nor does it place your inventory. Those are separate choices, and they are the ones with consequences.

Two ways to hold stock

The European Fulfilment Network keeps your inventory in one country and ships across borders from there. Fewer registrations, simpler life, higher per-unit fulfilment cost and slower delivery to distant customers.

Pan-European FBA distributes your inventory across countries so that orders are fulfilled locally. Amazon describes it as a service that lets selling partners sell across Europe quickly, with inventory stored in at least two of Germany, France, Italy, Spain or Poland, and Amazon redistributing products across the network at no extra charge. New products must be listed in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands with identical SKUs. On the tax side Amazon states it plainly: a VAT number is required for each country where goods are stored — which means you can begin with two registrations, because placement must be enabled in at least two countries, rather than registering in every marketplace where you sell.¹

The United Kingdom is not one of them

Amazon.co.uk is reachable from the same seller account family, which misleads people into treating it as a seventh European store. It is a separate customs and tax territory with its own rules, its own registration logic and its own product marking regime. British VAT for overseas sellers has no registration threshold at all, which is the opposite of how the EU thresholds work.²

Lesson 10 deals with the United Kingdom on its own terms. Until then, treat it as a separate project that happens to share your login.

Three decisions everything else follows from

1. Where the company sits. This determines your home VAT registration, your reporting language and which adviser you work with. Lesson 1.
2. Where the stock sits. This determines how many VAT registrations you carry and how fast you deliver. This lesson and lesson 7.
3. Who is responsible for the product inside the European Union. Since the General Product Safety Regulation applies, products need a responsible economic operator established in the Union, and marketplaces are obliged to check. Lesson 5.

Language, and what it costs

Listings can be machine-translated, and Amazon offers help with it. Machine translation is fine for a straightforward product and expensive for anything where a wrong word creates a return: sizes, compatibility, materials, instructions. Budget a human read for the product's key attributes in each language you sell in, and treat the translation quality as part of the return rate rather than as a marketing nicety.

The same applies to customer messages. A buyer writing in Italian expects an answer they can read, and response quality feeds the metrics from the U.S. course's lesson 12, which work the same way here.

Where to start

For most sellers entering Europe, the sensible first configuration is one country of storage, a single VAT registration, listings across the stores that the catalogue supports, and no Pan-European placement until the volume in a second country justifies its own registration. That configuration can be upgraded. A tangle of registrations made in the first month cannot easily be unwound.

Next

Lesson 1 deals with the first of those three: where to put the company, what changes for sellers established outside the European Union, and what Estonian e-Residency does and does not give you.