Author: admin

“Commissioner McGrath, fellow panelists, distinguished guests, my name is Dharmesh Mehta and I have the privilege of being Vice President of Amazon’s Worldwide Selling Partner Services organization, and I appreciate all of you and the Academy organizers for bringing us all together tonight. I’m going to start three decades ago, when Amazon first set out to be the world’s most customer centered company, where people can discover and purchase the widest possible selection at amazing prices with wonderful, convenient delivery, and this means at the center of this is customer obsession and focusing on our customers and how we delight them every day.

But for us, this isn’t just the millions of consumers that show up to shop, but it also means all of the small and medium sized enterprises who we serve and who are the entrepreneurs and the creative life blood behind all of these products in our store, and their success is critical to our success. And it’s why we obsess so much over how we make selling on Amazon easier, more efficient and more effective for them. This commitment aligns with Europe’s vision for a stronger Single Market – one that enables cross border trade, protects consumers and helps small businesses thrive.

So I’m going to start – since launching in Europe, which Amazon launched in 1998, we began a journey that would transform countless small businesses by working together to provide consumers with amazing selection, great prices, and unbelievable convenience. Now today, we have more than 127,000 SMEs here in Europe who trust us every day to help them grow, and we support them with technology, with infrastructure and capabilities that help small businesses do things that otherwise might only be available and possible for large retailers.

We’ve invested more than 225 billion euros in the EU since 2010 and we have stores in nine EU countries. We employ over 150,000 people, and through our partners, through these SMEs and others, we create over 450,000 jobs here in the EU. But these aren’t just numbers, they represent real people, real stories, real communities, real aspirations, and dreams. These are entrepreneurs who wake up every morning ready to build something remarkable, to reach and delight customers and to turn their passion into thriving businesses.

So let me share a few examples. I’m going to take first Christoph De Smet, he runs a brand called Garzini. He’s here in the room with us today. He’s a Belgian seller, and what began as an inspiration during his travels to Australia, has grown into something quite remarkable. His business doesn’t just create leather wallets, but they’ve spent years perfecting their designs based on real customer feedback and connection. Since 2020 his business has doubled basically yearly, and online sales have grown from 30% of their business to 70% of their business through international expansion, and they now reach customers in over 30 different countries. It’s fantastic.

Similarly, Dave McGeady is a brand in Dublin. They embody the spirit of European entrepreneurship, very passionate, customer focused and determined to make a difference. What started as a small business selling vegan protein powder, primarily in Ireland, has now grown to the point that nearly 90% of their business is on Amazon and reaching customers across the EU, the UK, and the U.S. They use things like Fulfillment by Amazon that allows them to export their products to customers, whether they’re in Berlin or in Boston, letting us handle the complex logistics of international delivery.

This is what’s possible when entrepreneurs and SMEs have access to the right tools and technology. So these Amazon Seller stories start with trust from people looking to purchase the widest possible selection of safe and authentic goods to sellers that are looking to grow their business. And so that’s why in 2024 we invested so much in this customer trust.

We invested over a billion dollars, or 850 million euros, and employed thousands of people that are dedicated to protecting consumers, dedicated to protecting our selling partners and our store from counterfeit, fraud, unsafe products, non-compliant products, reviews, abuse, or other things that can harm the customer.

When I think about how we work towards delivering that trustworthy shopping and selling experience, I think about three big things, our proactive efforts – powerful tools that we create – and collaboration in terms of the proactive efforts. We use artificial intelligence and human experts to proactively verify and continuously monitor our store for potentially fraudulent, infringing, inauthentic, non-compliant, or unsafe products. And these systems are operating continuously throughout our store and are constantly incorporating feedback. Feedback from customers, from brands and others, to strengthen these controls. And our goal is always to ensure that every product in our store is safe, authentic and trustworthy, and that we can stop issues before they happen.

We also, secondly, build a bunch of powerful tools so that others can partner with us, that sellers and brands can partner with us to protect consumers. These include things like Brand Registry, free service for brand owners to provide us information about their intellectual property so we can automatically better protect their brands. Things like transparency, that allow brands to serialize their products and individually authenticate every product unit they manufacture. To other ways that we work to stop hundreds of millions of attempts to create fake reviews, unsafe products, bad listings, and stop them before they ever get into our store. For customers, this is essential to be able to trust that they can have a trustworthy shopping experience. And for small businesses, these tools are essential as well – to be able to protect their brand at a cost, time, and effort investment that makes sense for small businesses.

Third, we collaborate with consumer protection groups, with law enforcement, with policymakers, and others across the industry. Our efforts are to identify and dismantle these counterfeiters, these criminal organizations, fake reviews, brokers, organized retail, crime rings, or anyone else who’s trying to harm consumers or harm our selling partners. And we do this through civil litigation, and we do it through criminal referrals. Not shared this before actually, we have this Counterfeit Crimes Unit that is coming up on its five years anniversary, which has initiated more than 200 legal actions that have resulted in over $180 million in restitution for brand owners and victims of these crimes, and has actually managed to put 65 criminals and have them receive prison sentences and end up in jail. We have to stop these bad actors and these criminals from operating and potentially harming consumers through things like the EU Product Safety Pledge that you heard about earlier and the Product Safety Pledge+, we’re helping to find best practices with the European Commission.

These partnerships, both public and private, are important to not only protecting our store, but helping protect consumers stay safe across the industry and wherever they choose to shop now. Building on this foundation of trust, we focus a lot on how we can help our selling partners with cutting edge tools, through things like Fulfillment by Amazon, Amazon Advertising, what we’re doing with generative AI to help power the creation of listings and branded content and advertising and so many other ways that we can help brands and sellers.

We’re trying to provide these powerful capabilities that allow brand owners and sellers to be able to spend more time inventing and sourcing amazing products so they can keep growing their businesses. And these innovations are helping create a more level playing field that fuels the success of small businesses. So there continues to be a rapid pace of innovation across the retail industry, and sellers have more choices than ever for where and how to sell their products. So we continue to focus on how we can innovate and help them succeed.

In 2024 our EU based SMEs generated more than 15 billion euros in export sales, reaching customers in 230 countries and territories all around the world. It’s fantastic. The success of what’s possible when we combine how we provide powerful tools and give them to creative, driven entrepreneurs has been an amazing success story, and while we’re proud of our progress in building trust and empowering sellers, we realize that there’s still more we can do together.

There are many opportunities to remove cross border barriers in the EU and create an even stronger Single Market. We spend a lot of time thinking about ways that we can do this, and we have a number of recommendations. I’m going to quickly just touch on three:

• First, we strongly support the EU’s work on digital product labeling. Right now, consumers struggle to access complete product information in their own language, while businesses waste tons of time and resources creating different physical labels for each EU country. By implementing a Digital Product Passport with a single data carrier, like a QR code or 2d data metrics code, we can give consumers instant access to up to date detailed information from safety specifications to environmental impact, and get all of this in their preferred language. This means spending less time on lots of labeling and quickly outdated information, and more time that sellers can spend creating great products and delighting customers.
• Second, we support the EU’s efforts to harmonize extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes. Today, a seller might need to navigate up to 19 different EPR categories and regulations just in front, from packaging to electronics to textiles. And for small businesses, this means managing multiple reporting obligations and fee structures, and it’s just way too much when you multiply this across the EU. There’s more than 100 different EPR regulations that an SME may have, and it becomes way too challenging. So we think an EU digital one stop shop for EPR is urgently needed to streamline both registration and report.
• Third, we welcome the EU’s work to modernize VAT compliance. Consumers benefit when they can easily buy from businesses anywhere in Europe. The complex VAT requirements often prevent small businesses from entering and serving customers across borders. For small companies, this is just way too complex, and it creates real barriers to growth. We look forward to supporting the implementation of simplified VAT procedures, ensuring more small businesses can serve customers across borders in Europe and create more of a level playing field.

Our teams have been working on these initiatives for several years. We’re glad to see they’re gaining some traction, and that some have been announced in the European Commission Single Market strategy. Now it’s time for us to deliver to effectively strengthen the Single Market, make it safer and more sustainable and help transform local companies into global success stories.

This isn’t just about commerce – it’s about enabling European competitiveness and autonomy. This is our opportunity to build an even stronger Single Market that truly works for everyone. Where consumers have stronger protections and where entrepreneurs can compete fairly, regardless of their size or their location. By streamlining regulations, we’re not just cutting red tape, we’re unleashing innovation, creating jobs, and helping European SMEs deliver for customers.

So we’re going to continue to invest, innovate, and partner with all of you to make this vision a reality. And I want to thank you for the chance to be part of this critical conversation.”