Amazon opens a support center in Barcelona for SMEs in southern Europe

It has started up with 200 employees and will create another 300 jobs in the coming years

A little over one year after announcing its choice of Barcelona as its headquarters, Amazon's Seller Support Hub is now open for business. This is a multilingual support center designed to provide assistance to the growing number of SMEs in France, Italy and Spain who use the Amazon Marketplace to sell their products.

The support center has been set up in a new building located in the 22@ technology district in Barcelona. This will be also be the site in the coming months of Amazon's new research and development center focused on machine learning technology.

There are already over 200 employees working in the new center, and the aim is to create a total of 500 jobs in the coming years. The objective of this center is to help small and medium-sized enterprises seeking to sell their products and to provide them with a customer care service in their language. This support will facilitate the sales process in both the south of Europe and in all the countries served by the 11 Amazon websites.

According to the company, tens of thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises in these three countries have already begun using its platform for selling worldwide. It claims that thousands of companies in Spain, with a total of over 10,000 employees, sell through Amazon Marketplace. Over 30% of them have already made the transition to exporting their products around the world. The value of their exports to the European Union alone exceeded 250 million euros in 2017.

François Nuyts, vice president and managing director of Amazon.es and Amazon.it, says: “In the last six years we have created over 2,000 permanent jobs in Spain. In Spain we've found professionals with great talent and an incredible desire to innovate and we intend to continue investing and creating employment here. Barcelona is the ideal place for our new Seller Support Hub. It is a city that combines international talent with a dynamic and innovative network of SMEs, entrepreneurs and startups”.

For his part, François Saugier, vice president of Amazon Marketplace in Europe, says: “Every day, we are seeing how businesses in Southern Europe are rapidly embracing the opportunities of e-commerce to expand internationally. We want to be the best partner for European businesses of all sizes, and the new Seller Support Hub in Barcelona will provide them with the training and support they may need to succeed in their transition to the new digital economy”.