Back in August 2021, Amazon made the ‘Country of Origin’ (or ‘COO’) field a mandatory requirement, with Amazon stating this is to improve the quality of listings, but more importantly for logistics reasons, such as FBA Exports.

What is the Country of Origin requirement on Amazon?

What country should you choose if your product is manufactured in more than one country?

Sometimes products can be manufactured through multiple countries, for example products where some parts are manufactured in China, and some others in India, then built in the UK. The requirement states that the country you should choose is where the last ‘substantial transformation’ happened. So in this example, the building of the product in the UK would classify as the last substantial transformation, and UK could happily be selected.

However, if your product is manufactured overseas, and for example a label is simply applied in the UK, this would not classify as a substantial change, and the overseas country would be correct.

There currently aren’t any official checks or paperwork required to evidence the country, however if it’s clear the product has an incorrect country set, and you run any FBA Export programme, your product could well be held up or even blocked by customs, so it’s important to get it right.

There’s a bit of a grey area when a product is packaged into branding packaging in a different country to that of the manufacture, as that is an important part of the product makeup and that could be argued as a significant change, however we recommend to stick with choosing the country where the product itself is manufactured, not the packaging or where the product is put into that packaging (if it differs from the manufacture country).

At Amazon Peanut we have years of experience working with many global brands and dozens of start-up businesses, helping them with their Amazon Seller and Vendor Central strategies. If you’d like to know how we can support you, please get in touch today.