Amazon Belgium PPC Guide

Amazon.com.be opened in October 2022 and prices in euros. It serves shoppers in Dutch, French and English from a single storefront, which makes it structurally different from the other European stores a seller is likely to have worked in. For a seller already trading on amazon.nl, amazon.fr or amazon.de, Belgium is a short step rather than a new region, but it is not a copy of any of them.

The defining feature is language. Belgium has no single shopping language, and the storefront's customer-facing languages are Dutch, French and English. German is an official language in part of the country but is not one of the storefront's languages. Amazon lets you submit a listing in French or Dutch and then translates that content into the store's other customer-facing languages, so a single-language seller is not shut out of the second audience. What machine translation cannot do is choose the words a Belgian shopper actually types, and Belgian Dutch and Belgian French both diverge in everyday product vocabulary from the language used on amazon.nl and amazon.fr. Treat the translated copy as a draft to review, and treat your own keyword and search-term work as language by language from the start.

The second feature is the set-up work sitting behind the store. Belgium is one of the Pan-European FBA stores, but it is not a country Amazon places inventory in under that programme: to earn local fulfilment fees on Belgian orders you have to enable placement in Germany or France, so Belgian orders are normally fulfilled across a border. Tax follows where the stock sits. Holding stock in Belgium triggers a Belgian VAT registration, while sales to Belgian customers from stock held elsewhere in the EU are usually reported through the Union One Stop Shop instead. A business established outside the EU that does need a Belgian registration has to appoint a fiscal representative, which takes time worth starting before the listings go live. The sensible order of work is tax and fulfilment first, listings second, advertising third.