Amazon Just Added the Netherlands as a Mandatory Market for Pan-EU FBA
Starting today, September 3, every product enrolled in Pan-European FBA needs an active offer on Amazon.nl, whether the product is new to the program or has been enrolled for years. Amazon confirmed the requirement applies to both new and existing Pan-EU FBA products, with a second expansion already scheduled: Belgium becomes a required market starting February 26, 2027.
If you use Pan-EU FBA and you've never bothered listing on the Dutch marketplace because you had no specific interest in Dutch customers, that's no longer optional.
What Actually Changes and What Doesn't
The core requirement is straightforward: to keep your Pan-EU FBA benefits, you now need an active offer on Amazon.nl for every enrolled product, using the same SKU as your other European listings. You do not need to build a new product detail page if one doesn't already exist for your item on the Dutch site, and you're not required to physically store inventory in the Netherlands just to comply.
The existing storage-placement rules haven't changed. You still only need to enable at least two countries for Amazon to store your inventory, and that can be any combination of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, or Poland. Listing on Amazon.nl is now a separate, additional requirement layered on top of that existing storage flexibility, not a replacement for it.
Why This Is Happening Now
Amazon's own framing points to growth: the company told sellers this expansion helps them “reach thousands of new customers, increase your FBA sales, and reduce fulfilment fees.” But there's a clear competitive backdrop worth understanding too. Amazon currently ranks as the second-largest online retailer in both the Netherlands and Belgium, well behind Bol.com, the dominant local ecommerce platform in both markets.
Bol has recently started actively recruiting international sellers, including sellers based outside the EU, essentially running the same seller-base expansion strategy Amazon itself has used for years. Amazon requiring its existing Pan-EU FBA sellers to list in these two markets is a plausible, direct response: rather than winning new sellers from scratch, Amazon is converting sellers it already has into Dutch and Belgian marketplace participants by making it a condition of a program many are already relying on.
The VAT Detail Worth Knowing Before You Expand
If you're a UK seller managing Pan-EU FBA compliance, there's a separate, unrelated change worth factoring into your planning at the same time. Amazon's VAT Calculation Service moved from unit-level to shipment-level VAT calculation on June 1, 2026. Under the old method, Amazon calculated and rounded VAT separately for each individual unit in an order. Under the new method, items get grouped by tax rate and VAT is calculated once on the total invoice amount before rounding.
The difference per unit is often just a penny or two, but repeated across thousands of orders, that rounding discrepancy can create real, cumulative differences between Amazon's own VAT reports and your accounting system. Adding new marketplaces to your compliance footprint is exactly the moment small VAT reconciliation gaps like this tend to surface and compound, so it's worth checking now rather than after you've expanded into a third or fourth EU marketplace.
What to Actually Do Before This Affects Your Account
Review every ASIN currently enrolled in Pan-EU FBA and confirm each one has an active offer on Amazon.nl using the correct SKU. Check specifically for suppressed, inactive, or incomplete listings, since those are the ones most likely to fall out of compliance without triggering an obvious warning first.
If you manage a large EU catalog across multiple marketplaces, build this Netherlands check into a recurring review process rather than a one-time fix, and schedule a second full review before the Belgium requirement takes effect in February 2027. Amazon's pattern with the Netherlands, adding a mandatory listing requirement roughly a year or two after opening a smaller European marketplace, suggests Belgium likely won't be the last market added to this list, and getting ahead of that pattern now is easier than reacting to it retroactively each time a new country gets added.
