Any timelines of being able to ship to Ireland FBA warehouse?

#1

I’m asking this more out of desperate home than anything, but I’m Irish and use FBA. After Brexit, I stopped sending stock to the UK warehouses and started shipping to the German ones. Obviously, that’s been an increased expense (average shipping price per item has jumped from 20c all the way up to 90c an item now :confused:) . I had hoped when the fulfillment center opened in Dublin back in September, we’d have seen some movement on being able to ship stock in there, but it’s been utter radio silence since.

Does anyone know, typically, how long it would take Amazon between opening a center and allowing people to ship stock to it? Its so stupid that I’m having to ship stock from Ireland to Germany when there’s a fulfillment center 30 minutes away from me. I’ve not been able to find any information from Amazon about such a thing, or even a line of enquiry to follow with seller support (who obviously won’t be told much until it’s actually a thing).

#2

Opening a centre for stock to be stored and fulfilled from is different from a receiving hub
That one may never become a receiving hub
Not to say they won’t change that or open one that is

#3

I would think that this will only be possible if Amazon ever have an IE only website. At the moment there would be far too many issues with customs if they start shipping to the UK from an IE fulfilment centre.

The downside of this would be that you would only be fulfilling to Irish Customers…not sure what the demand would be for that.

#4

I say this fully aware that, at the end of the day, Amazon likely has the data to work out whether there is a demand short and long term.

Amazon has a massive grip of the market here in Ireland. Everyone I know buys regularly from Amazon, and the Amazon delivery vans are very visible throughout the day delivering stock. Any time I tell people I work as an online seller and use Amazon, it’s always met with a flurry of questions about when we’re getting a .ie version of the site. There’s enough demand that they’ve very publicly been investing heavily into their fulfillment network here in Ireland over the last 12 months especially.

We are getting very close to next day delivery times on Fulfilled orders from the UK (I placed an order yesterday that arrived today, but most stuff is still 48 hours), and they obviously felt there was enough of a demand to build a big fulfillment center in Dublin to begin with. I’m not sure what stock they’re storing here though; you’d have imagined Brexit would have made it unlikely they’d be shipping goods for storage between Ireland and UK. I’d presume, perhaps ignorantly, that it’s more Pan-EU stuff being stored in Dublin? Otherwise, there’d be customs fees and paper work and so on, no?

I guess, optimistically, I’m just hoping since they’ve gone to all that trouble of building a huge fulfillment center, there’s some sort of mid-to-long term plans to set up the .ie website, and some sort of plan to let us Irish sellers ship to the warehouse that’s right on our own backdoor. :sweat_smile: I’d wager even if we only have, say, half the population of a Sweden or a Belgium who have their own sites, they could surely just build half the facilities (which they already seem to have build now, anyway) and work towards a .ie.

#5

I wouldn’t build your hopes on an Irish site just yet.
There have been no announcements and Amazon has in actual fact, been reducing facilities recently.

I really don’t see why you would want to sell in Germany/France etc with the additional shipping costs, when you could just sell from the UK.
VAT registration is required for whichever country you store stock in, so it’s actually no different.

I doubt the fact that they have a centre in Dublin has anything really to do with PanEU etc, simply because, again, there is no IE site. What would be the point in storing stock in Ireland, when the sales are being made at the closest in France (for PanEU)?
So it’s more than likely, that there is just sufficient demand for orders from the UK, that it’s worth having a centre there. It is after all, a fairly big city.

#6

and, if you accidently type amazon.ie into a browser, it defaults to UK site too
i would presume Irish buyers would be looking at UK site, not EU ?!

#7

I’m VAT registered in the UK. Had to be to sell and store stuff in the UK before Brexit.

When Brexit happened, it created so much fees and paperwork for transporting goods between Ireland and the UK that it just became untenable for someone of my size (self employed, sole trader, selling a variety of different toys, games, etc, rather than a single product).

As it was explained to me at the time by DHL with whom I have an account, to ship stock from Ireland to the UK, I need to do full breakdowns of the shipments, individual codes entered for each different product, and pay hefty enough fees and tariffs as the stock crosses borders. The sheer added work load and costs really made it non-viable at the level I was shipping in. At absolute best, it was as expensive to ship to the UK as it was to Germany, with a tonne of added paperwork as well. Whenever I’ve broached the subject with DHL, the response has always been you’ll be paying as much for both now.

So in the end, it was easier and basically as cost-efficient to shift storage over to Germany instead.

I know since then, they’ve made storing in Germany and selling to the UK somewhat cheaper and easier. It’s not two utterly separate systems now. But the EU market is ultimately way, way larger than the UK one as it stands, so it doesn’t make sense to store in the UK with all the added nonsense Brexit has caused, compared to the ease (albeit expense) that the EU offers me.

(I’d absolutely love to be corrected and told such shipments are signficantly easier and cheaper nowadays, but I have a feeling until significantly better trade deals are introduced, that’s unlikely…)

#8

When it initially started, it was much harder. But as things have gone on, it has eased.

If your concentrating on the EU though, then you probably want to register in France. That brings the transport costs down and with at least two countries, you can then register for PanEU.

#9

I price checked with DHL for France and Germany at the time, and it was literally the exact same. They basically had France and Germany paired together, and then Spain and Italy paired, in terms of price bands. So it being much of a muchness, I registered with Germany for VAT and chose there.

This conversation actually made me go through my DHL account, and I took a shipment I sent yesterday bound to Germany, and entered in some details into the system but with a UK based address.

Germany shipment cost me €220.
UK shipment, with duties paid, cost €218. About €30 roughly was additional tariffs.

So, in fairness, the costs have come down somewhat, and the DHL system is way, way easier to work with now than the last time I looked.

Still takes an age to go through, entering commodity codes, descriptions and making sure all of that lines up. There was 50 unique product lines in yesterday’s shipment, for instance, so that would be 50 times I’d probably have to go through the entry process (as opposed to Germany which just asks for a general description, rather than line by line breakdowns).

#10

You might want to have a look at other couriers.
I’ve just done a little searching and found the below.
All for a 20kg parcel, measuring 40x40x40 for comparison.

Eire - UK, DE or FR using DPD (pickup Europe) was £22.
Don’t know the weights etc your actually sending, but it’s probably worth finding out more.
I only got those prices through Parcel2go, so you can more than likely to better with a business account.

#11

I would imagine it would be fast moving goods in Ireland which are cheaper/easier to source locally.

It is almost certainly all Amazon Retail stock I doubt very much they hold third party seller goods as this would have all kind of implications for VAT.

closed #12

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