This morning a bunch of us woke up to something new sitting in Creator Studio: the beginning of Amazon’s global storefront rollout. I don’t have it yet. Plenty of you don’t either. That’s fine, it’s still rolling out, so don’t panic. But I’ve read everything Amazon has published about it so far, and I have a lot of thoughts, some excited and some not. Here’s what we know right now and what I think you should do about it.

In This Article

What the Global Storefront Actually Does

Amazon has already documented this inside Creator University. Go to the tab at the top that says something like “How to Earn” or “Earn More” and there’s a section called Global underneath it. Here’s the short version. If the US is your home base, you’ve been cross-posting to other countries either manually with your own fingers or through some kind of tool. The global storefront eliminates that work for ten countries total.

The way it works is you keep your main storefront. Your videos sync up to what is essentially a global storefront in the cloud, and Amazon disseminates them out to the other nine countries automatically. Amazon handles the translation according to its own rules. Amazon handles the product tagging. The documentation even says that if the exact product doesn’t exist in that marketplace, it will tag a similar product. You don’t touch any of it.

The Ten Countries on the List

Here is the full list of marketplaces included in the rollout right now:

  • United States
  • United Kingdom
  • Canada
  • Germany
  • France
  • Spain
  • Italy
  • Netherlands
  • Poland
  • Sweden

Keep that list in your head, because the fact that the US is on it is the single most important detail here, and most people are reading right past it.

Why I Am Excited About It

Let me start with the good stuff. I’ve never been big on cross-country posting. I’ve only ever done Canada and the UK. I’ve been trying to diversify outside of Amazon, not go all Amazon, all the time. So for me, this gives me access to nine markets that I was never going to put time into, and it does the work automatically, based on Amazon’s own rules, which means it’s compliant by definition.

It also solves a problem a lot of us got burned on. Remember when we didn’t know how much Amazon wanted us to upload and people were getting their butts spanked for uploading too much to other marketplaces? That question is gone. Amazon is the one parsing out and dispersing the content, so there’s no such thing as “did I do too much.” They’re handling the dispersion themselves.

And obviously there’s the visibility angle. A lot of these countries don’t have very many influencer videos. Some of them don’t even have upper carousels and run on different systems entirely. But it’s still additional exposure I would not have had otherwise.

The Road Runs Both Directions

Here’s the part I don’t like, at least on the surface. If you’re a US influencer, you’re only looking at this from one angle: look at all this opportunity I have in nine new countries. But the US is on that list for everyone else too. A creator in Germany or the UK is looking at this and going, finally, I get easy access to the US marketplace.

A lot of them were probably already cross-posting into the US manually. But there’s no doubt that whenever you widen the road, more people travel down it. So I think we should pump the brakes on “yay, we’re about to get all this extra attention and eyeballs.” So are the other nine countries, and they’re all pointed at the US.

If you remember, about five or six months ago Amazon ran a low-key test in the carousels that showed videos from other countries. It was a completely separate section. You had brand videos, influencer videos, and then videos from other countries. I think it may have even sat below the customer review videos. We all looked at it and said that sucks, because it was putting more videos into the carousel. And we even joked at the time, wouldn’t it be crazy if you could just post in your own country and have it show up everywhere else?

That looks like where we’ve landed. I don’t know if that’s the exact implementation, but the exposure has to live somewhere for this to matter at all. If you’re excited as a US influencer, it’s because you think you’re getting carousel exposure over there. That’s the exact same reason creators overseas are excited about exposure over here. If your videos are showing up in their carousels, theirs are showing up in yours.

What Happens to Countries Not on the List

There are going to be people bummed by this because they’re already doing more than these ten countries. Here’s the open question I really want answered. If you claim the US as your home base, will Amazon still let you post in Singapore, for example, since it’s not on the list? Is this Amazon’s way of controlling where you’re allowed to post?

I don’t have the answer yet. Maybe you do. If you’ve claimed the US as your primary storefront and you’re still able to post into marketplaces that aren’t on the list, I’d like to hear about it. For some of you this matters a lot, because you’re earning real commissions from those other countries and losing that access would be a real hit.

Stop Cross-Posting Right Now

Here’s my practical recommendation, even if the global storefront hasn’t shown up in your Creator Studio yet. Stop uploading to the other nine countries. Amazon is going to take those videos down and replace them with the synced versions regardless, so any cross-posting you do into those marketplaces right now is probably wasted time.

Put that time into your home storefront instead. The videos that sync globally are the videos on your main storefront, so the quality of what’s sitting there is what gets multiplied by nine. This is a good moment to run a Storefront Cross Check in Oink, clean up anything with dead or unavailable products using Unavailable Video Matching, and make sure the catalog Amazon is about to broadcast for you is one you’re proud of.

My Honest Read: 65/35

Amazon has done so many things in the last couple of weeks, testing this, moving that, that it’s starting to feel a little overwhelming. I know they’re doing it in preparation for Q4, and for Q4 this could be a very good deal if the positives end up outweighing the negatives. More exposure than I would have gotten anyway is still more exposure. But I am concerned about the impact flowing back into the US from nine countries that just got an easier on-ramp.

So I’d put myself at 65 percent excited and 35 percent not. A lot of that middle ground depends on how the rollout actually shakes out, and I’ll keep updating you as I learn more.

Whatever the global storefront turns into, the influencers who win Q4 are the ones with a tight, well-tagged home storefront and a product research process that doesn’t depend on Amazon’s next surprise. That’s exactly what we built Oink for Influencers to do. Grab the extension, run your Storefront Cross Check, and get your catalog ready before Amazon starts broadcasting it to the world.

I'm an Amazon Influencer since 2023 and blogger since 2021. My goal is to help you succeed in the Amazon Influencer Program.

Similar Posts