Eva Faict, director of Amazon in Belgium: “There are a lot of fantasies about us”

A great sportswoman, Eva Faict is preparing to run the London marathon in April and the “Soup Trail”, a race in her adopted region. “My professional life is very active. I spend a lot of time in Luxembourg, where Amazon’s European headquarters is located. Running helps me clear my mind. I also love observing the changing seasons when I run in the forest.” Belgian at heart (“I never introduced myself to anyone as being Flemish”), Eva Faict enjoys her life in Wallonia. “We have more things in common than differences. We Belgians are all lovers of the good life, of good meals.”

You launched amazon.com.be, a site dedicated to Belgian consumers, two years ago. Why this choice?

The idea is to have a more personalized site for the Belgian customer, better suited to their needs. Before, French-speaking Belgian consumers went to the sites amazon.fr or amazon.nl for Dutch speakers. Today our site is bilingual. Some products could not be delivered to Belgium from the French or Dutch sites. We started with 180 million products available on the Belgian site and we now have more than 400 million products which come both from Belgium and from around the world. These products include, for example, many everyday products such as diapers, batteries, cleaning wipes, memory cards, etc. Everyday essentials top our bestseller lists. There were a lot of barriers for the Belgian customer before the arrival of this site.

Why not choose the name amazon.be for this site?

The name of the site was already taken. This is not really a problem because more than half of our customers use the application and we therefore do not need the URL address. We “nationalize” a site when there is real interest for the consumer. Amazon has been in Europe for 25 years and we first created specific sites for Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. We then launched Turkey, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands… and now Belgium. Next year, we will create a site for Ireland. The idea is also to offer more specific loyalty programs to our customers by highlighting local products.

How many Belgian customers do you have?

We do not communicate this figure, but I can tell you that I am a happy manager! We now have more than 1,400 Belgian small and medium-sized businesses working with us. Last year, they sold 10 million products, which is a spectacular increase of 75% compared to the year before. We employ 350 people in Belgium, some of whom work at our Blue Gate delivery agency in Antwerp. It is sometimes said that Belgium is behind in terms of e-commerce compared to other countries, but this is not the case: 90% of Belgians buy online. We should be more proud of our country. Our economy is robust and stable and it is easy to do business.

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There are a lot of criticisms about the “Amazon” model. The economist Sir Paul Collier recently described the company as a “dangerous animal”, in particular because of an alleged stranglehold on global trade. What do you say to these accusations?

Yes, there is often this perception, but it is not correct. I’m not going to say we’re a small business, but retail is a very competitive industry characterized by low margins. Amazon accounts for less than 1% of global retail sales. There are quite a few fantasies about us, probably also because we offer a very wide range of products, we are also present in entertainment, the cloud, etc.

One of the other criticisms is that Amazon does not offer a very environmental model with this multitude of package deliveries.

The environment is something fundamental at Amazon. In 2019, we committed to achieving carbon neutrality by co-founding The Climate Pledge, in order to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement ten years early and have implemented certain initiatives. Nine out of ten parcels in Belgium are already delivered via electric vehicles in Antwerp and even cargo bikes in the center of Brussels (Pentagon). By 2023, all electricity consumed by Amazon operations worldwide, including data centers, administrative buildings, physical stores and distribution centers was directly sourced or offset by renewable energy with seven years ahead of our goal. We also invested more than a million in a forest project linking Flemish and Walloon Brabant. This involves linking the historic forests of Soignes, Meerdael and Halle Wood.

But isn’t having a package delivered, sometimes from the other side of the planet, more polluting than going shopping in a local store?

A 2021 study by Oliver Wyman and Logistic Advisory Experts (LAE), a spin-off from the Institute of Supply Chain Management at the University of St. Gallen, found that e-commerce generates between 1.5 and 2.9 times lower greenhouse gas emissions than physical retail – including the returns process. At the same time, e-commerce saves four to nine times the traffic it generates, with customer deliveries accounting for only 0.5% of total traffic in urban areas. Stores consume energy for their heating and lighting. Many people also still do their shopping by car.

There is still this possibility of returning packages in case the product does not please one of your customers. A practice that multiplies journeys, right?

We try to be as preventive as possible, because package returns also penalize us: they are expensive and not durable. We now offer services to help customers get the right product the first time and thus reduce returns in the first place, such as detailed descriptions, images and videos, as well as AR visualization to place products in your domestic environment. In 2023, our Product Lifecycle Support (PLS) program helped avoid the return of more than 11 million items in the United States and Europe, an increase of 50% from 2022. We have learned that Customers are more likely to keep a garment when a size is recommended to them. Last year, our system generated nearly 3 billion great recommendations every month for millions of customers in 19 countries around the world, including Europe.

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Are you a threat to local business?

It is the customer who will tell us what their preferences are. We work with a lot of SMEs present and none of them operate exclusively online. They have different sales channels and that’s fine. I think the shopping experience will always exist: we often need to touch a product, to try it before buying it. I believe that the future for stores is to have both an online and physical presence. I don’t see any competition between the two modes of operation. On the contrary, they complement each other. A Kantar study from last year shows that sellers generate their revenue through multiple channels. A typical salesperson on a marketplace generates 28% of its turnover via its own website, 11% via social networks, 26% via its own physical stores, 9% via retailers and 23% via one or more marketplaces online.

Some say Amazon has plans for a low-cost platform to better compete with Chinese rivals like Temu and Shein. Is this the case?

We have nothing to announce on this subject. What I can tell you is that we are always exploring new ways to work with our seller partners to delight our customers with more choice, lower prices and greater convenience.

Do you pay taxes in Belgium?

Of course. We don’t report the figure by country, but we pay hundreds of millions of euros in corporate taxes across Europe. We act everywhere in full compliance with local tax laws.