One of the largest brands we have ever spoken to arrived with an offer most agencies would sign the same afternoon: take the whole catalogue. We said no, and asked for a few products instead. At INNELS we work as a full service marketplace agency across the European market, which means we are the ones who have to deliver whatever gets signed, and a full catalogue handover on day one is the fastest way to be extremely busy without being effective. The decision was not modesty, and it was not caution dressed up as strategy. It came down to three operational reasons about how Amazon actually works in Europe, plus a fourth that sits with us rather than with the client.
A brand does not need our promises. It needs to see one launch work.” — Andrejs Klimovskis, Founder
A brand of that size does not need another agency telling it what is possible; it has heard every version of that pitch already. What it has not seen is what we do with a small, real piece of its business, under its own approval process, against its own numbers. A narrow scope makes performance legible: when eight products move, everyone can see what changed and why, and nobody has to argue about attribution across four hundred ASINs and five marketplaces at once. A full catalogue does the opposite. It spreads effort thinly enough that early wins get lost in noise, early mistakes get buried, and by the time either becomes visible the relationship has already absorbed six months of cost. We would rather be judged quickly on something small than slowly on something enormous.
Small scope makes results legible. Nobody argues about what moved.” — Mark Daniel Zalomajev, Founder
Every catalogue has a logic that is not visible from the outside: how variations are structured, which product families share components, which SKUs are strategic and which are legacy. Layered on top of that is the internal machinery — who signs off on copy, how long legal takes with a claim, which imagery rules are firm and which are preference, and what the word "good" actually means inside that specific company. None of this is in a brief, and none of it survives being guessed at. The first products are how we learn it, and that knowledge is precisely what makes the next fifty products work rather than needing to be redone. Scaling before you have it does not scale the brand; it scales an assumption.
On Amazon, sequence is money. Germany and the UK are the two largest Amazon markets in Europe — Amazon generated roughly 45.9 billion dollars in Germany and 43.2 billion dollars in the UK across 2025 — so that is where a launch budget buys the most signal per euro spent. Concentrating spend in two markets produces ranking movement, conversion data and search-term learning that a budget spread thinly across five markets simply cannot. That matters more than it used to: Amazon ranks on its A9 system with a COSMO intent layer on top, and both are fed by behavioural signal, which is exactly what a diluted launch fails to generate anywhere. There is also a structural point worth planning around — since 25 June 2025 the Netherlands has been a required marketplace for Pan-European FBA, so adding countries is an operational commitment rather than a checkbox.
Two markets with real budget beat five markets on scraps.” — Niks Saknitis, PPC Manager
This is where expectations need calibrating. Reviews can be shared between marketplaces when listings sit on the same ASIN, surfacing as reviews from other countries on the local detail page, which is genuinely useful when you extend from the UK and Germany into France, Spain and Italy — but Amazon controls this behaviour, it has changed it repeatedly, and from 12 February 2026 it began restricting review sharing between variations with significant functional differences. Treat inherited reviews as an advantage you may receive, never as a plan you depend on. Keyword data is clearer: Brand Analytics and Search Query Performance are reported per marketplace, and search language and behaviour differ by country, so local research is unavoidable. What does transfer is structural — which attributes drive the decision, where the funnel leaks, and which content answers the objection — and that is worth more than a translated keyword list.
“Structure travels between markets. Keywords do not. Budget for local research.” — Niks Saknitis, PPC Manager
Compliance is the part of European expansion that does not scale by copying a listing. GPSR (Regulation (EU) 2023/988), in full effect since 13 December 2024, requires an EU-based Responsible Person named on the product or packaging for non-food consumer goods, regardless of how many marketplaces you sell on. Extended producer responsibility then applies per country and per waste stream: Germany means LUCID for packaging plus Stiftung EAR for electricals plus a battery registration; France means an ADEME unique identification number with Triman and Info-tri labelling; Italy means CONAI, and every other market runs its own register. PPWR (Regulation (EU) 2025/40, in force since 11 February 2025 and applying from 12 August 2026) harmonises the format and the marketplace verification duty, but it does not merge those national registrations into one. Adding a country to a phased rollout gives that work somewhere to sit; adding five at once does not. Our free EU compliance checker is the quickest way to see where a catalogue currently stands.
A pilot only teaches you something if it is built to. We choose products that represent the catalogue’s real complexity rather than only its bestsellers, because a hero SKU tells you nothing about how the awkward variation family behaves, and we agree a single success metric per product before anything goes live so that the review at the end is a reading rather than a debate. We launch in the UK and Germany first, run at least one complete content cycle through the brand’s own approval process so both sides learn where the friction is, and give it enough time to produce meaningful review volume and search-term data rather than a fortnight of noise — the relationship between early reviews and conversion is well documented in e-commerce research, and it does not happen on a two-week timetable. Compliance registrations for the next markets are started during that window, not after it. Everything we learn about approvals, claims, imagery and tone gets written down as we go, because that document is the actual deliverable that makes the wider rollout fast.
Write the brand rules down as you learn them. Then scale.” — Andrejs Klimovskis, Founder
There is a fourth reason, and it is about us rather than the client. A very large account changes an agency: you build capacity around it, you plan around it, and one day you notice you depend on it. That instinct has a number attached to it in every other industry — US accounting rules require disclosure once a single customer passes 10 percent of revenue, and buyers of agencies commonly look for no client above 10 percent with the top three combined under 25 percent. Growing into a large account gradually protects both sides of the table: the brand gets to test us before committing a catalogue, and we grow capacity we can actually hold rather than capacity built on one signature. Declining the full catalogue was not leaving money on the table. It was putting it in an order that survives contact with Amazon’s European reality. If you are weighing a full handover against a phased rollout, put these questions to the INNELS team before you sign either one.
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