Ronan Smyth: Amazon.ie a prime marketplace that brings concerns
March 19, 2025
Amazon.ie is here and is already positioning itself as a champion of small- and medium-sized Irish businesses with a dedicated “Brands of Ireland” page, promising to help them grow in scale and success.
However, retailers may be sceptical about the company and its attempts to entice them to sell on their platform.
The global retailer has been building towards the launch of its own Irish store front Amazon.ie for many years, following the establishment of its fulfilment centre in Dublin back in 2022.
The company already had a massive presence in the country, employing around 6,500 people in areas such as data engineers, operations management and finance
Access to Amazon’s marketplace and most related services has been available to Irish consumers for years.
Amazon’s British operations deliver to Ireland — barring a few products here and there — though Brexit caused issues with some purchases subject to import fees when dispatched from Britain.
For Irish subscribers signed up to Amazon’s British website who paid for Prime, they could access all their streaming content on top of the other member benefits.
So, in part, this is a branding exercise for the company, and getting Irish companies on board is just one element. Whether small- and medium-sized businesses will benefit from selling on Amazon.ie is yet to be seen.
Having access to a vast marketplace through Amazon.ie means having to play by the company’s rules and this puts partnering sellers at the mercy of a global tech giant, and its algorithms.
In 2021, Amazon in India was accused of exploiting its vast troves of internal data to promote its own merchandise at the expense of other sellers.
Amazon denied the accusations but thousands of pages of company documents — seen by news agency Reuters — showed the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.
On the consumer side, Irish people will benefit from the reduced Prime membership rate — €6.99 now for Amazon.ie, compared to the £8.99 (€11.26) it used to cost an Irish consumer using Amazon.co.uk — as well as import fees being removed.
However, like all other subscriptions, Amazon has increased prices over the years and the new Prime member price for Irish people may not last very long
While it is still early days, and the jury is still out on whether Amazon.ie will be a net benefit for consumers and retailers, it is clear that Amazon does expect to benefit from this launch.
It would not spend these kinds of resources to establish the site and the fulfilment centre if it didn’t expect a return on investment.
The “Brands of Ireland” page, the promise is to help SMEs grow, as well as the reduced pricing for Prime membership is all being done in an attempt to drive up website traffic, but if costs start to increase — or profits decline — customers might find these initiatives first on the chopping block.
Irish businesses will have to decide for themselves whether the risks of partnership with Amazon outweigh the potential downsides.
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