German small and medium-sized businesses sold more than 20 billion euros through Amazon in 2025, and 5.9 billion euros of that, almost a third, came from export. Both figures are Amazon’s own, published in its German SME report.
The export share is the part worth carrying into a planning meeting. A third of the money German sellers make on Amazon is already being made outside Germany, and more than 80 percent of those businesses sell to customers abroad. Cross-border is not the growth project in that market. It is the base case.
What Amazon published
The report covers calendar year 2025 and the headline figures are straightforward. German SMEs selling on Amazon generated more than 20 billion euros in total sales. They moved more than 750 million products, which Amazon converts into more than 1,400 items a minute. Export accounted for 5.9 billion euros, described in the report as almost a third of the total.
The destination list is the most directly useful thing in it. Amazon names France, Austria, Italy, the United States and Spain as the top export markets for German sellers. Four of the five are inside the single market and the fifth is the one that is not, which is a reasonable sketch of where a German seller’s second and third markets actually sit.
More than 80 percent of German SMEs on the platform sold to customers outside Germany. That figure appears once, without a breakdown, but it is the one that reframes the others. A business reading this and treating export as an advanced move is behind the median seller in its own market.
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What the report stopped publishing
The seller count is where this gets interesting, and it is worth being precise about what can and cannot be said.
Amazon’s report gives a number of German SMEs exactly once, in passing, inside a section about artificial intelligence: more than 40,000. That is a floor. It is not a count, it carries no methodology, no definition of what qualifies as an SME, and no date beyond the report’s own year. The report makes no comparison to any previous year, publishes no prior-year seller count, and gives no growth rate for German SME sales at all.
Two years ago the picture was different. Reporting on the 2023 edition, Ecommerce News Europe put the figure at around 47,500 sellers and described it as having remained steady. A precise-looking number then, a floor now.
What follows from that is narrower than it first appears, and the narrow version is the honest one. More than 40,000 is consistent with 41,000 and it is equally consistent with 48,000. The arithmetic that turns a precise 47,500 into a floor of 40,000 and reports the difference as sellers lost is arithmetic performed on a number that does not support it. Nothing in this report establishes that the German seller base shrank.
What can be said is that Amazon has stopped publishing a figure it used to publish, in the one document whose purpose is to describe this population, in a year when it chose to publish a record revenue number alongside it. That is a fact about disclosure rather than about sellers, and it is the fact a reader should take away.
Tool comparison · FastMoss vs Kalodata
A platform’s own report is the only source for most of these figures, and it publishes what suits it. FastMoss and Kalodata do the equivalent job for TikTok Shop, reading category demand from outside the platform rather than from its announcements.
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FTC disclosure: our tool comparisons carry affiliate links. If you sign up through one we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. We rank on merit, never on commission, and the verdict is written by a human.
Record revenue, unknown denominator
Put the two together and the shape of the problem is clear. Amazon has published a numerator, more than 20 billion euros, with no usable denominator attached to it.
Revenue per seller is the number that would tell a German operator whether the market is getting better or worse for businesses like theirs, and it is precisely the number this report cannot produce. Twenty billion euros across 41,000 sellers and twenty billion across 48,000 sellers describe two different markets, one consolidating and one broadening, and the published figures cannot distinguish them.
This is not a small omission in a document of this kind. An SME report exists to characterise a population of small businesses. Reporting that population as a floor, once, in a section about something else, removes the only basis on which a reader could judge whether the headline is good news for them specifically.
The per-minute figure is worth a moment for the same reason. More than 1,400 products a minute is the annual total of more than 750 million divided by the number of minutes in a year, which comes out just above 1,400. It is the same measurement restated in a more quotable unit, not a second one, and it describes a rate nobody experiences: no minute of the year looks like the average minute in a business with a Christmas peak. It is a good illustration of a figure that is accurate, derived and empty at the same time.
Worth noting alongside it: the report’s own infographic alt text carries a figure of over 2 billion euros where the text says more than 20 billion. That is an obvious slip rather than a competing claim, and it is not a second figure, but it is a reminder that the document has not been read closely by its publisher either.
The growth rates are not Amazon’s
Several figures circulating with this story do not come from the report. The comparison to 2019 international sales of 2.75 billion euros, the 2024 cross-border figure of 5.7 billion euros, and the conclusion that international growth slowed to a few percent in 2025 are all trade-press constructions, assembled from previous years’ coverage and arithmetic performed on top of it.
They may well be right. They are not in Amazon’s report, Amazon publishes no growth rate for German SME sales, and the slowdown conclusion is a calculation rather than a disclosure. Anyone putting a growth trajectory for German SME export into a plan is using someone else’s subtraction, and should know that before they rely on it.
Tool comparison · FastMoss vs Kalodata
Export share is the number worth benchmarking, and no marketplace publishes yours against the market. FastMoss and Kalodata both break demand down by country, which is where a cross-border plan starts.
Comparison coming soon
FTC disclosure: our tool comparisons carry affiliate links. If you sign up through one we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. We rank on merit, never on commission, and the verdict is written by a human.
What a seller does differently on Monday morning
For a German seller, three things, and the first is the one with a number attached.
- Compare your own export share against a third. That is the platform-wide figure for German SMEs on Amazon in 2025, and it is the cleanest benchmark this report produces. If export is well under a third of your revenue, you are behind the typical German seller on the same platform, and the gap is a measurable one rather than a feeling.
- Check your coverage of the five named destinations before opening a sixth. France, Austria, Italy, the United States and Spain are where German export revenue on Amazon actually goes. A plan that reaches for a market outside that list before covering the ones inside it is choosing difficulty it has not been asked to take on.
- Treat any seller-count claim about German Amazon sellers as unsupported for now, including the ones arguing that the market is consolidating in your favour. The number that would settle it has not been published this year.
For a seller outside Germany, the transferable item is the export share rather than the euros. Germany is the largest Amazon marketplace in Europe, and a third of its SME revenue crossing a border is a reasonable prior for what a mature European seller base looks like.
Where the honest uncertainty sits
The seller population is published only as a floor, once, with no method and no prior-year comparison, so no trend in seller numbers can be established from this report.
Amazon publishes no growth rate for German SME sales, so the direction of travel on revenue is also unavailable from the primary source.
The report defines neither SME nor the basis of the sales figures, so it is not stated whether the 20 billion euros is gross of fees, or how the per-minute figure was derived.
The export destination list is given in order without values, so the five named markets cannot be sized against each other.
The three-line version
- If you run the marketplace account, the number to take away is a third, which is the export share of German SME revenue on Amazon in 2025, and the five destinations that carry it. Benchmark your own split against that this week.
- If you have just taken on European expansion, the gap worth naming is that the seller-count side of this report is a floor with no prior year attached, so any consolidation argument built on it is unsupported. Say so before someone builds a plan on it.
- If you sign the budget, there is nothing to approve here and one thing to refuse. Do not accept a business case that claims the German seller base is shrinking, because the figure it rests on is a floor and cannot carry that claim.
Sources
- Amazon Deutschland, KMU Report 2026: https://www.aboutamazon.de/news/unser-beitrag-fuer-unternehmer-innen/amazon-kmu-report
- Ecommerce News Europe, German SMEs generate over 20 billion euros in sales on Amazon: https://ecommercenews.eu/german-smes-generate-over-20-billion-euros-in-sales-on-amazon/
- Ecommerce News Europe, Double-digit growth for German SMEs on Amazon: https://ecommercenews.eu/double-digit-growth-for-german-smes-on-amazon/