Amazon US launch for UK and European brands.

The order we use is the home marketplace first. Get the UK account ranking and profitable, then open the US from a position of strength rather than into it. That is the sequence we ran across a three-year collagen engagement, published with the figures attached in the Ancient + Brave case study, where the US and Europe were launched after the UK account was already compounding rather than as a way of rescuing it.

The honest version of that advice is that for a lot of brands the answer is not yet. If your UK hero product is not ranking on its main non-branded search terms, if the margin only works at full price, or if you are already short of stock in one country, a US launch will not fix any of it and will take the management attention that would. A second marketplace doubles the operational surface: another catalogue, another set of compliance questions, another advertising account competing for the same cash. Brands that open the US to escape a UK problem generally end up with the same problem twice.

There is a real exception and it deserves naming, because the rule above is not universal. If your category is materially deeper in the US, or your format is an American one the UK has been slow to take, or you already have US demand arriving unprompted through your own website, then waiting for a perfect UK account is its own kind of cost. The test is not which marketplace is bigger, because you already know the answer to that. It is whether you can fund and staff two launches at once, and if you cannot, which single one you would rather have running properly in twelve months.

Start with the gap, because it is larger than most brands assume. Statista puts Amazon's 2025 net sales in the United States at $489.7 billion and in the UK at $43.2 billion, which makes the American store about eleven times the British one. The same figures carry a second point that gets much less airtime: Germany, at $45.9 billion, is bigger than the UK. If your reason for going to the US is simply that it is the biggest market, the number sitting next to it says you have at least one other option, closer, in the same time zone, and already inside your existing account structure.

Amazon publishes one figure that is directly about this decision and directly about this reader. On its own page for European businesses selling into the United States, it says that sellers who list products in both their local Amazon store and on Amazon.com generate over 40% of their sales from Amazon.com on average. It is the most useful number in the category, and the footnote under it is worth reading before anyone budgets against it: Amazon internal data from May 2023 to May 2024, comparing Europe-based sellers who list only in their local store against Europe-based sellers who also sell on Amazon.com. Those are two different groups of sellers, not one group before and after. The figure tells you how much of a working cross-border seller's revenue ends up American. It does not tell you that opening the US will add 40% to yours.

The bill starts small and stops being small quickly. Amazon's own Professional selling account runs at $39.99 a month on that same page, which is a rounding error against everything else. What is not a rounding error is inventory sitting in American warehouses for the first time, freight and customs, and an advertising budget buying visibility in a deeper category where you have no ranking, no reviews and no sales history. Treat the launch as a funded position for two quarters rather than a spare-capacity project. Our own fees are published and modelled in ten seconds, in dollars as well as pounds, so a real number can go into the plan before you speak to anyone.

This one is our position rather than a rule Amazon publishes, and we will own it as ours. We treat a hero product that is not convincing on its ratings as a reason to move the launch date, not as something to tidy up once the listing is live. A new US listing starts with no sales history and no ranking, so the star rating and the review count do almost all of the persuading in the first weeks. Advertising into a weak one buys clicks that convert at the wrong rate, which costs money twice: once at the checkout and again in what it teaches the algorithm about your product.

We hold that position partly because the published evidence on ratings is more interesting than the folklore. PowerReviews analysed lifetime ratings across more than 20 million product pages on over a thousand brand and retailer sites and found the conversion sweet spot at 4.75 to 4.99 stars, with the single largest jump between bands coming from 3 to 3.49 stars up to 3.5 to 3.99. The most useful line in it is the one about the top of the scale: products averaging a flat 5 stars convert comparably to products averaging 3.0 to 3.49. That study is general ecommerce rather than Amazon specifically, and it is our inference rather than theirs that it should govern a launch date, but it does say that the rating is read as a number and not as a row of stars.

Whether your existing UK reviews will show on the American listing is the question brands ask us next, and the honest answer is to check it inside your own account rather than take anyone's word for it, ours included. Amazon's documentation on sharing reviews between stores sits behind the Seller Central login, and the public record is seller forum threads describing different behaviour in different years. Assume you are starting from zero and treat anything that carries across as upside.

The work that follows is the same work that moves conversion in any market, which is the listing itself rather than the traffic pointed at it. What changes in a new store is that you have no baseline to test against, so the order matters more than usual. Get the main image, the title and the A+ content right before the advertising budget arrives, because the budget will mostly multiply whatever the listing already does.

Barcodes have the cleanest answer of anything on this page, and it is good news that almost no competing page bothers to give you. A GS1 licence is not tied to one country. GS1 UK answers it directly: regardless of what Amazon country site you are selling your products on, you can still use our GS1 UK barcodes on all of them. The same answer carries the operational detail that trips people up, which is that GS1 UK issues a GTIN-13, Amazon calls that an EAN, and you select it as the product ID type when you list. So the barcodes on your UK products are the barcodes for your American ones, and nobody needs to buy a second set.

The risk sits somewhere else, and it surfaces during a US launch because that is when the catalogue gets rebuilt. GS1 UK is blunt about barcodes bought from a reseller: the number still belongs to the original company, is not licensed to you, and you run the risk of your products being delisted if the number you are using is registered to somebody else. It says it has seen many cases where sellers did not know they were using pre-registered numbers and had to reallocate and reprint packaging. A brand that has been trading happily in the UK on cheap numbers for three years can meet that problem for the first time in the middle of an American launch window, which is the worst available moment to reprint a carton.

The account and the company are the next two questions, and Amazon answers both on its own page. It says European businesses should create a Professional North America and Brazil unified selling account, and states plainly that as a European business, you may not be required to form a US company to sell your products in the US. Setting the account up includes a self-service tax interview that produces the right form on your behalf. Whether a US entity is nevertheless the right answer for your business is a question for your accountant rather than for an Amazon agency, and we will tell you that rather than guess at it.

Category clearance is where launches genuinely stall, and it moves independently of anything marketing does. Supplements, food, cosmetics, toys and electricals all carry American requirements that have nothing to do with the UK ones you have already satisfied, and Amazon tells European sellers to review the compliance, safety and listing requirements for the US specifically, separately from every other store it operates. We do not give regulatory advice on a web page and you should be wary of an agency that does. What we do is put the compliance questions at the front of the plan instead of the end, because a labelling or formulation problem found in month four costs a launch window, and the same problem found in week one costs a fortnight.

Everything we run on a UK account has an American equivalent, and almost none of the numbers carry across. Click costs are higher, the category is deeper, and a keyword that funds your UK account can be a losing bid in the US at exactly the same conversion rate. The structure transfers intact. The targets underneath it do not, so a brand that ports its UK bids straight into a US account and leaves them alone usually reads the result as an American problem when it is an arithmetic one.

That is why the argument in the first months is about measurement rather than tactics. Advertising return on its own will make a new marketplace look worse than it is, because early on you are buying rank and reviews as well as revenue. The number worth watching is total advertising cost of sale across the whole account, with a ceiling worked back from your own gross margin, so the cost of establishing yourself is a decision somebody made rather than a surprise somebody explains later.

The disciplines are the same five we run on any account, run as one system rather than five suppliers coordinating by email: strategy, operations, full-funnel advertising, DSP where it earns its place, and reporting a board can read. If you are a supplement or wellness brand, how those five run in that category is set out separately, with the UK figures attached.

We should be straight about the proof, because it is the first thing a careful buyer checks. We have not published a US outcome. RippleEffect runs accounts on US marketplaces today, and the collagen brand in our case study was live in the UK, the US and Europe with the American and European stores launched as part of that engagement, but every figure we publish is a European figure and we are not going to dress one of them up as an American one. For the brand this page is written for, that track record is the relevant one anyway. You are a UK or European business going to the US, and evidence that the method works in the market you are leaving is worth more than an American logo on an agency that has never run a cross-border launch.

The test we apply before agreeing to run one of these is four questions, and it is yours to use without us. One: is the UK hero product ranking on its main non-branded terms, or is every sale still being bought? Two: does the product clear American category requirements today, with the paperwork in hand rather than in progress? Three: is there stock cover to supply two countries through the first twelve weeks without rationing either? Four: is the launch funded as a position for two quarters rather than out of this month's profit? Three or four yeses and the US is a sequencing question. Two or fewer and the problem you are trying to solve is still a UK one, which is a cheaper thing to be told now than in March.

The way to find out is a free Amazon account audit: your listings, campaigns and catalogue, with a prioritised set of first moves and a straight read on whether the US belongs in the next twelve months. It is with the founder, and you see how we think before you pay for anything.