The sale of products via the multinational has grown by 600% | The main sectors to use this sales channel are computing, electronics and watchmaking.
Asturian SMEs increasingly look to commercialise their products and services outside of Spain, and even out of Europe, reaching markets in other continents in countries such as Russia, China and North America. The internationalisation of these services calls for significant logistical and operational deployment, entailing an economic and human capacity that many Spanish SMEs simply do not possess.
However, there are alternatives and means to compete within the international market. One of these options is Amazon – the main online sales website for products on a global scale. Currently, around two hundred Asturian SMEs sell their products on the platform, which reached Spain in 2011. This figure is considerably higher than that of the previous year. Specifically, according to data provided by regional media, the number of SMEs that use Amazon to reach further-afield parts of the world has grown by 600%.
The SMEs that use Amazon to sell mainly belong to three sectors: electronics, computing and watchmaking. These are small and medium enterprises that either do not have an online store of their own to use as a means of selling abroad without having to open physical stores, or they use Amazon as a distribution channel, as it gives them storage centres that they use to send merchandise to clients that make purchases on this platform.
A third type of SME corresponds to companies that send the merchandise directly to Amazon so that the multinational can take control of the entire packaging and distribution process, regardless of the logistical capacity of the SME in Asturias. This format comes at a greater economic expense but it has advantages for buyers, as it can provide a competitive advantage against other similar products, such as free deliveries or reductions in the time it takes to receive the product.
