Customer Support for International Sales
This article applies to selling in: United States

Customer Support for International Sales

When you sell in an Amazon marketplace, you are required to provide customer support in the local language of the marketplace. For instance, if you are selling on Amazon.jp or Amazon.es, you are required to provide customer support in Japanese or Spanish, respectively. You can choose to do it on your own or you can have Amazon do it when you join FBA.

Fulfilling orders on your own

Local language customer support

When you choose to fulfill customer orders yourself, it's not just the picking, packing, and shipping to customers that you'll need to handle; Amazon also requires that you handle customer support. This can be challenging if you are selling in an Amazon marketplace where you don't know the language.

You may be tempted to use automated computer translators to respond to email inquiries from international customers. However, a risk to this approach is that machine translation may lead to less-than-optimal translations, which in turn could lead to a poor customer experience, ultimately affecting your seller performance ratings. A better option, if you do not have in-house customer service capabilities in the local language, is to use third-party service providers to handle your customer support.

Timely responses

Customers expect prompt, helpful service when they have questions or concerns about your products. To maintain a healthy seller scorecard, you should have customer service specialists who understand your products, that know where the customer's product is and when it will be delivered, and who will be able to respond quickly (within 24 hours) to customer e-mail contacts in the local language. This may be challenging when selling in marketplaces that are in different time zones from your place of business, as the time differences will shorten the time frame in which you can respond to customers during your regular business hours.

There are many online resources that can help sellers with customer support. Here are a few links other sellers have found useful organized by region.

Customer support services in Company
North America Seller Engine
Europe InterCultural Elements
Japan Jumbo

Fulfilling orders through FBA

When you use FBA, Amazon will provide 24-hour customer support on your behalf in the local language of the relevant marketplace. For many sellers, this feature of FBA is critical to selling on international marketplaces successfully. With local language customer support already included in FBA, you can provide your customers with Amazon's world-class customer service, and you can focus on growing and managing your business.

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