Amazon Australia is Live!

In lieu of my usual roundup of all the Amazon news, I'm honing in this week on Amazon's fresh launch in Australia, which happened earlier today.

This is a long awaited event - especially for me as a native Australian. Few details have been forthcoming about when Amazon.com.au would launch, and what it would look like for consumers and brands alike.

Now that the site is live, we can finally see under the hood and take some guesses as to what features Amazon will roll out next. Here are four observations of the new market launch so far.

There’s no Prime program (yet).

No products on Amazon.com.au are part of the famed Prime membership program, but the website announces that it is “coming in the future”. Other Prime benefits like Prime Video and Twitch are available for a small monthly fee of $2.99 but this doesn’t include any shipping discounts.

Even items ‘shipped from and sold by Amazon’ (products that Amazon holds as their own inventory) are not included in a Prime program. Despite having an active fulfillment center in the eastern city of Melbourne, there’s no sign of the legendary membership program on the Australian site (yet).  

However, Amazon has their trademark free shipping over a $49 AUD threshold ($37.22 USD). “All orders of $49 or more of eligible items across any product category qualify for free delivery within Australia.” Delivery times range from 3-7 days (major cities) to 7-10+ days for other areas.

Marketplace items (those sold and shipped by third party sellers) are not eligible for the free shipping. This will potentially cause some confusion for consumers.

There are no ad placements.

Sellers have not yet been given the chance to set up ads, and it appears that Vendors have not either. Thus, there are no product or brand advertisements on the site at all! There are some advertisements and rich content created by Amazon to promote their electronics products, and to lead users to browse certain categories. But it makes for a surreal browsing experience to see literally NO ads on the Amazon Australia site.

Above: An Amazon.com Seller Central Dashboard with more features and promotional capabilities. Below: An Amazon.com.au Seller Central Dashboard, with limited capabilities.

As you can see from this screenshot of an Australian Seller Central account, it lacks many of the features available on the full US Seller Central interface, including Advertising, B2B (business to business) product offers, and Storefront pages.

There are no product reviews.

On other non-US marketplaces, Amazon pulls in customer reviews from other sites if there are no or few reviews on the local site.

For example, this candle had no reviews on the UK site, so a review written on the Germany site was pulled in to display natively. Most consumers like to read reviews, but few take the time to write them. Amazon understands this, so the feature that pulls in product reviews helps give credibility for new or slow-moving products.

Amazon Australia has no such feature yet, which will cause more of a drag on adoption and sales.

Seller Central is linked to the North America interface.

Amazon’s Seller Central platform has been linked in the past by geography - with the US, Canada and Mexico marketplaces on the ‘North America’ platform, and the UK and EU nations on the EU platform.

Australia has been linked to the North America platform, as opposed to an Asia Pacific platform which could include the India, Japan and China markets.    

I'm not yet sure there's any real significance to this move. You could surmise that Amazon seems to be making Australia a priority by putting it in front of its core US seller audience, but at this stage that might be a stretch given the lack of other features available so far.

So, what does this mean for brands?

My perspective is that brands who've delayed entering Australia because of the cost or complexity now have a great reason to do so. Amazon will provide the leverage and proven processes to make it a worthy investment.

Our Ecommerce Braintrust podcast this week is all about the Australia launch. I interview Australian retail expert Scott Kilmartin to talk about the significance of Amazon launching in Australia now, and how the market is a little different to any that Amazon's launched in so far.

In that episode we talk about how Australia punches above its weight from a consumer spending standpoint. Though a small country population-wise, Australians are big trend followers of international trends and its a country with high disposable income.

The show comes out on Wednesday - Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you don't miss it.