Sales numbers on books that had previously been imported to Europe via Amazon have fallen by as much as 50% for U.S. publishers.
That’s according to one Publishers Weekly contact who said that that the biggest tangible impact of the latest move by the Everything store is that most of the supply chain costs have moved from Amazon to publishers.
Per Jim Milliott, this is due to a change in sourcing policy “that Amazon says it has made to meet its sustainability goals” and that the change “is raising costs and leading to lost sales in European markets.”
Amazon responded that this was forewarned: “We began notifying publishers over a year and a half ago that beginning this spring we would no longer be ordering books from the U.S. to ship to the U.K. and E.U. to fulfill sales. We asked publishers to look into locally sourced options and provided a number of solutions for publishers to choose from including local printing, print on demand, and alternative shipping.
But publishers that PW has spoken to say the move is raising costs and making, that it harder to keep popular books in stock, and that the sales numbers on books that had previously been imported to Europe via Amazon have fallen by as much as 50% for U.S. publishers.
Read more at PW.
