Listings, languages and advertising

The listing mechanics from the U.S. course apply unchanged: be found, be understood, be believed. What Europe adds is that each of those has to work in several languages, and that the failure mode of bad translation is not embarrassment but returns.

Where translation quality matters

Machine translation is adequate for the parts of a listing that describe what a product is, and inadequate for the parts a buyer relies on to decide whether it fits. Spend human attention on:

• Sizes and dimensions, including the units a local buyer expects.
• Compatibility claims — what it fits, what it does not.
• Materials and contents, which matter for allergies and for regulated categories.
• Instructions and warnings, which are a safety matter as well as a commercial one.
• The title, because a mistranslated title wins clicks from people who wanted something else, and those clicks become returns.

Everything else can be machine-translated and improved later. Treat the translation budget as part of the return rate, not as a marketing expense, and it becomes easy to justify.

Price per country

The same product does not carry the same price everywhere, for three reasons: VAT rates differ, so an identical shelf price yields different net revenue; fulfilment and delivery cost differs by country; and competition differs, sometimes sharply, between the German and Italian versions of the same listing.

Set prices per marketplace from the net figure you keep after VAT and fulfilment, not from a single euro number applied everywhere. If you price uniformly and the numbers work in Germany, they may not in a country with a higher VAT rate and slower delivery.

Advertising

Amazon's advertising works the same way as in the U.S. course: Sponsored Products are cost-per-click ads for individual listings and require a Professional selling account; Sponsored Brands and display ads additionally require a brand enrolled in Brand Registry; adult, used or refurbished products and closed categories are not eligible.¹

What differs in practice is that you are now running campaigns in several languages, and search terms do not translate neatly. A keyword that converts in Spanish may have no volume in Dutch, and a direct translation of a good German keyword is often a phrase nobody types. Start with one country, learn what converts, and expand campaigns after the listing itself is proven there.

Reviews

Reviews are marketplace-specific, so a product with a strong review history in one country can look new in another. That is an argument for starting narrow and for patience, not for shortcuts. The rules from the U.S. course about incentivising reviews apply to European marketplaces too under Amazon's own policies, and European consumer protection law takes a similarly dim view of fake reviews.

Mistakes

• Machine-translating sizes, compatibility and warnings. This is where returns come from.
• One price across all marketplaces. VAT and fulfilment differ.
• Copying keyword lists between languages. Search behaviour does not translate.
• Advertising in five countries at once before one listing is proven.
• Missing VAT numbers in the account, producing invoices buyers complain about.
• Expecting review history to travel between marketplaces.

Next

Lesson 9 is operations: reconciling payouts across currencies and countries, keeping VAT records that survive an audit, and the reports you will be asked for.