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Inside Amazon: What Amazon.ie Reveals About Retail’s Future

Episode 112 • 27th November 2025 • The Retail Tea Break • The Retail Advisor

Welcome to season nine of the award-Winning Retail Tea Break podcast. My name is Melissa Moore, The Retail Advisor. I'm a retail educator, trainer and retail conference MC. Each week as your host, I'll be joined by industry experts, retailers, and brands to dispel the myths, share their knowledge, and give you an insight into the retail industry.

You can listen back to previous seasons on your favorite podcast platform, and while you're there, do me a favour, hit that follow button so that you get to listen first every week. You can watch us now over on YouTube and subscribe to the Retail Tea Break. You have no idea how useful that is to ensure that I can keep bringing you the content that you love.

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So today I'm joined by a true retail leader who has a passion for innovation, a deep understanding of the Irish retail market, and a commitment to lead with a customer centric vision. She's held various positions, including consulting with top grocers, including Tesco, Sainsbury's, and Asda on customer and category strategies, and having been with her current employer, Amazon, for almost a decade, she's worked across a variety of roles in retail, including vendor services, marketing, product management, and customer experience. Her expertise further expanded during her tenure as digital innovation leader at AWS, where she worked closely with C-suite executives from some of the world's largest corporations, pioneering development of the industry first generative AI solution across multiple industries. Alison Dunn, country manager for Amazon Ireland, welcome to the Retail Tea Break podcast.

Thank you Melissa. It's great to be here.

Thrilled that you are joining us. I know this is your first podcast, so absolutely delighted that you've, you've chosen to talk to us here.

But look, I'm gonna jump straight in 'cause you have the most phenomenal retail background. So in the age old question of in the time that it takes to boil a kettle, which I am told is about two minutes, tell us a little bit more about you and your background in the industry.

Oh sure, happy to. So I've always had a really big passion for retail and great customer experience, and that led me to doing a BSc in what was DIT but is now TUD. So I did a BSc in retail and services management there. But even before that, my background has always been a foundation of working in retail shops. So I used to work at the top of Grafton Street in one of the shops. I've been the stock room rummaging for shoe sizes and I've always just really loved working in retail.

And then after my degree, I moved to London and did some work, more work in retail, but did some work as a visual merchandiser in House of Fraser. So I was literally the person up at 4:00 AM at the top of the cherry picker, hanging the Christmas garlands and dressing mannequins and doing Christmas windows. So I absolutely loved that side of the business.

So that ultimately led me into Kantar where I was in their retail consulting team. So like you said, I was working across the UK grocers at the time, so Asda, Sainsbury's, and for the most part Tesco. So I was working with Tesco for about two and a half years, doing everything from promotion strategies, customer segmentation, category insights. And that really is what led me into Amazon. So while I was there, we had kind of insider intel that Amazon might be launching Amazon Fresh in the UK, which is their grocery business, which I was super curious about to see how does big tech giant like that come into the grocery sector.

So I sent a speculative LinkedIn note to one of the recruiters at Amazon and luckily for me, a month later I was signing a contract for a confidential project, which was Amazon Fresh. So that was the start of what's been a 10 year journey at Amazon. So, I feel very privileged. I feel like when I came into Amazon, I was, it was like a duck to water because the culture is quite unique in that it's very fast paced. It's very, people are very ambitious and driven, but everything is incredibly customer focused, which really resonates with me. So truly everything is built around the customer and designed for the customer.

So I did about four years in our retail business across multiple roles, like you said, in marketing and product and vendor services and things like that. And I had a really good foundation of how Amazon thinks about innovation and what we want to do for customers. So I had a bit of a sliding doors moment about four, four and a half years into my career, where they asked if I would want to set up the product team for Amazon Go, which is our convenience store.

So physical retail was a kind of new string to my bow, it would've been amazing. But at the same time I was offered an opportunity to set up something new on AWS, which was where we were bringing our innovation philosophy and all of the things we were doing about designing for customers and thinking about how do we externalize that for AWS's strategic customers. So bringing those big strategic customers on Amazon's innovation journey and understanding their challenges. So it really felt like one of those kind of, only at Amazon could you pivot from being a hardcore retail person over into the cloud business, which I really like, I had no background in cloud, so for me it was a big gamble.

But I took the bet and went over to AWS for about four years where I was leading AI and innovation strategies for multiple industries. So I was still on consumer packaged goods, but I was also doing things like fan experiences for some of the Premier League football clubs, or

my goodness,

thinking about cancer diagnostics for the big healthcare life sciences. And one of the projects was around wrapping subsea cables and AI membranes that it could send data back up to the cloud for renewable energy. Like it was phenomenal, a really big expanding moment in my career. So I loved that.

had moved back to Ireland in: 2019

Goodness me, you've had the career of about five different people and I almost feel like getting to know you over the last kind of week or so that you are only getting started, and I think that's what this exciting thing, you bring such an enormous amount of real retail experience. And actually, it's all wrapped up together and I think we're so lucky to have you back in that respect. But what an amazing kind of career you've already had. But yeah, I have absolutely no doubt that it's going to push forward.

And as you mentioned there, obviously Amazon launched here back in March with Amazon.ie. We're such a unique market, which obviously like you know that, you know it so well, how's it all going?

Yeah, and, and thank you by the way. But yeah, the response has been phenomenal. So like we continue to be humbled by how the response is going since we launched. So I think there's a common misconception when you're a big global company that it's as simple as switching the domain name from .co.uk to .ie. So I think like for us internally, we know that it's a huge amount of work and it's actually very complex. So everything needed to be built from the ground up. So every single tech stack, every single widget, every single backend component. It's a huge operational and technology kind of feat to be able to do it. So the team are amazing. And the team, the team really were the ones who did it.

But I think the reception in the market is also really positive for us because Amazon has been here for 20 or more years. So Irish customers are very familiar with Amazon's proposition, they're very loyal to Amazon. And then for us, we needed to make sure that we were building a store that from day one we were gonna meet those types of expectations, which is a hard, a hard bar to set.

But we're really proud of the store that we did launch. So we launched on day one with over 200 million products, which even still, I can't really fathom 200 million products. Um, when you think about, it's really hard to imagine. And then since launching, a few months since launch, we've more than doubled that. So there's continued growing momentum around everything we're doing and the store that we've launched in Ireland, it gives a much better customer experience for Irish customers.

So, now when you're shopping the site, everything that you see you can actually buy, you can get it delivered to your home address. You know, the price that you see is the price that you're gonna pay. Returns are free, which they weren't previously. And then there's things like Prime membership is almost 33% lower than it would've been if an Irish customer was subscribing to UK Prime. And they also get all the added benefits. Before you couldn't use the cinema benefits or the delivery food benefits. So everything with the Irish proposition is really tailored to the Irish customer. And the other thing we've done is we've launched a Brands of Ireland store. So we've created a dedicated storefront where we want people to be able to discover Irish brands, both the ones that they know very well, but also maybe ones that they didn't know about. So they'll be able to go online, browse and find them. And then for those businesses, we're giving free account management. We're doing kind of video and marketing for them to help photograph and design their products and put them on the website to serve both Ireland but also internationally.

Goodness me, I can't get over the figure that you just rolled off your tongue there, but also the huge amount of expertise that's out there as well. And also the fact you call it a shop. I've never heard it called a shop before. And actually that stopped me on my tracks there that you are, but I've never looked at you that way.

I know when we say we opened our virtual doors on our shop.

Oh, I love that. Yeah. I absolutely love that. New research as well that you've just come out with. You've compiled it into the impact of e-commerce on consumers here in Ireland, and it's shown the Irish e-commerce market is expected to grow from 5 billion, more of these big figures here, 5 billion estimated at 14% of total retail to 8 billion in five years. That in itself is absolutely unreal.

What are the other headlines jumping out from you from this study 'cause it's incredible?

Yeah, it was an interesting report actually, and I think Deloitte, they surveyed over a thousand Irish consumers and then created their own econometric index looking at price, and I think that was one of the more interesting things for me when I was going through it, was that they found that e-commerce is having a disinflationary impact on price.

Wow.

So essentially prices would be 4.1% higher if we weren't operating through e-commerce. So it's helping Irish customers, particularly in a challenge, challenging economic environment to have more spending power and to get access to more lower prices and better deals. So, that was something interesting.

And I think, like you said, over 86% of Irish customers are shopping online now. So it is huge and I think it's gonna continue to grow. But I think one of the encouraging things we also saw from it was how much people are still going in store. So we know that e-commerce gives a huge amount of benefit in terms of access to more products, kinda more convenience and sometimes better prices. But 83% of people are still shopping in store once a week, which you and I know as, as retail people like this is what we've always said is that they, the channels, they compliment each other. And we know that people want both. So it's giving customers the choice ultimately.

It's fantastic and I love the fact that this report as well, yes, it's looking at e-commerce here in Ireland, but it's so much broader than that and I was delighted, obviously as someone like you that has kind of grown up through the retail industry on the shop floor, that physical has played a significant role and you haven't shied away from that in this report. So regardless of consumer habits, it says, as you said, 83% of consumers reporting shopping in store at least once a week. So, you know, we haven't walked away from these physical stores up and down the country. And what's interesting then is it says the ability to try products before purchasing is a key metric there with 30% of people needing to touch and feel, which again, as retailers we know. So it's lovely to kind of see that still there and so important to Irish consumers. Wanting to assess product quality then, 27%. So again, really important for the Irish shopper to know and feel, you know, the quality of products that we're purchasing, especially this time of year. And then evaluating product attributes at 20%. So, so many advantages. But it's really great to hear that someone like Amazon is saying actually you can have both.

Yeah, exactly. And I think one of the facts in it was 70% of people will use online to do product research. So if something is a kind of maybe a higher consideration product or it's more expensive, people will go online and do a lot of research on reviews or the product description, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they then won't go in store, especially if it's something very expensive, they might prefer to go in store and buy it, but having all the access online and, and a brand showing their product both online and in store is important so that customers can then have the choice ultimately how they want to shop it.

And it's fantastic to kind of feel and see that cohesion here that, you know, we are elevating the whole retail industry in Ireland. It isn't just one or the other. I think it was certainly seen like that for quite a while, that you either had this physical store or, like Amazon with your shop, you had this kind of e-commerce platform, but now we're saying, look, both is absolutely fine if once you're meeting the need from the customers, which you've certainly said from the outset today, that's what's important here.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's ultimately down to customer choice.

It has to be. Another thing that jumped out to me, it's all about me today, and these Amazon findings, I was absolutely fascinated that the study revealed the benefits for rural communities, just like where I am up here in Mayo, 41% of rural respondents citing access to shops outside their local areas as a key motivator for shopping online. It's so important.

That's it. I think it's this thing. It's giving access to this kind of global marketplace almost, where it's not possible to have everything in the main street on Irish towns. So it gives those rural communities really easy access to get the products that they need. And I think it's meeting a customer need.

And I think for us, that was something we were very conscious of before we launched. So we agreed a five year partnership with An Post to make sure that every single eircode in Ireland can make sure that they get their Amazon delivery from their trusted An Post postman, who they probably know by name.

So whether you're kind of in Dublin in the city center or out on the peninsula of the Dingle Peninsula, you'll be able to get your package and no doubt your Irish postman will know exactly which house is yours. So that's something that we're hoping to increase next year, as well as how fast we can get to rural communities.

I love that and I know I'm really grateful for that. It's great to see the post van coming at about one o'clock every day. And it's really nice, I think you've chosen An Post as well to do that, you know, trusted, loyal service provider all over the country, and meeting the needs again of the customer.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's something that is so important for us, and it gives us that assurance that we also can trust that if a customer shops through Amazon.ie, they're gonna get it in the time that we've committed to.

Which is gorgeous and it's really lovely to hear that. One thing I do want to talk about, and I think it would be remiss of me not to. I'm mindful, and again, at this time of year, I truly am. We know we're in the golden quarter, busiest time of year.

I'm really mindful that, as you've already mentioned, on our main streets up and down the country, in the villages and the towns, there are so many independent retailers. There are so many small Irish businesses. You know, we've got kind of national chains up and down the country as well. Gorgeous indigenous brands. I know you've, you've mentioned that, I certainly know an awful lot of them at this stage from working in the business. Some of them are genuinely fearful of you being here in Ireland, you know of yous opening up back in March. They really do fear the fact you are here in the market and I suppose feel that you are taking from their business and also, I suppose, fearful that it's pushing them out of a market that they really need.

Yeah, we hear that a lot and I think there is a little bit of a misunderstanding on how Amazon works and how we operate because people assume that Amazon is a big retailer, which we are, but we're actually an even bigger marketplace. So over 60% of our sales globally go through our marketplace business, and that's where our selling partners are choosing to list through Amazon and choosing to use Amazon as a way to reach more customers globally.

And for us, we only succeed if our selling partners succeed. And since taking on this role, I've actually met a lot of the Irish businesses and gone out and met the brand owners face to face. And a lot of what they tell me is that actually Amazon offers them another option.

So it gives them an option for kind of flexibility in their website or how they might wanna run their own e-commerce businesses. Because ultimately when you think about like POS, like handling, staffing, delivery, like doing the pick, pack and stow of your own products and then all of the customer service and returns. It can actually be a huge overhead for some of those businesses. So some of them choose actually not to even have their own website because maybe it's too much or they just can't take it on. And Amazon's marketplace essentially, it's just another offering and within that there's lots of different options.

So sellers can choose to deliver their own products or choose for Amazon to take care of it end to end. So I think it just gives people a different option. So for those businesses, I think what we would say is just explore the different options. We're not here to come and take away business. If anything, what we want is that people can get access to more customers and to reach global storefronts with the trust that we have.

And I think there's been some amazing Irish brand examples. So I know you know Ella and Jo very well. They're one of my favorite, uh, brands that we have on the Brands of Ireland storefront. And they're one of Ireland's fastest growing skincare brands, and they had amazing success on Amazon. So as soon as they listed through Amazon, they had 300% growth in their sales. And it's helping them from a global brand reputation point as well, because they get great customer reviews, which is down to their awesome product. But customers all over the world can go on and see those customer reviews through the Amazon website, and ultimately they're getting the benefit from any investments that we make in technology or the website or any marketing or branding that we wanna put around Irish brands, they also get the benefit of that.

So for us, I think it's, we are gonna continue to highlight Irish brands, so there's only positives for us that can come from that. So I would just encourage people to explore it as an option and just be, be mindful that we're not here to take it away. Absolutely not. We don't want to do that.

I think this is a really interesting kind of story here, and it's something we probably haven't heard enough of. In fairness, you're only here and open since March, but is this idea that actually you can support and elevate Irish, whether it's an independent retailer, whether it's a brand like Ella and Jo, that actually they should almost be utilizing you as a portal to new customers, but also to a more global kind of level, which again, is I think something that we don't necessarily think of.

Yes, Ireland, it's fantastic. You're here. There's what, 5 million odd people here, but you haven't closed your doors on the rest of the world. If anything, you've made it really easy now for me selling a product here in Mayo that actually other people around the world can find.

Exactly and like genuinely, we invest so much in our selling business and our selling platforms and things like that. So one of the amazing tools we have is called Export Central. So as soon as a brand is listed on any store, they could choose to list on Amazon.ie first, or Amazon Germany first. But as soon as they're listed, they can within about three or four clicks, sell into 39 different marketplaces.

So it really is like one of those kind of no brainer almost if you're looking to expand and to gain an international audience for your brand. And like I said, there's loads of options in terms of how much you want to manage your own returns or your own customer service, or if you want Amazon to take care of it. It's incredibly flexible.

And you mentioned there earlier as well, and again, I'm really interested in this, the support there. Like you don't just kind of click a button here and trial this on your own and hope it works. You actually have loads of people there in the background to support, again, small little retailers or independent brands out there.

Exactly. And like a lot of our Dublin team, like more than half of our Dublin team here are supporting the Irish brands directly, they're account managers who are on the phone supporting customers and businesses to get listed and to reach those audiences. So that's one of my passions.

I think as you say, it comes the fact, you know the market really well. The team obviously do as well, that actually we are elevating Irish retail and Irish brands. It isn't a one or the other. 'cause again, I look, it has been, it's been talked about so much in the press, that yous are here, we should all be fearful. But actually it sounds like we can both elevate the retail game and serve customers, which is what we're all here for.

I wanna jump back really quickly 'cause something else I want to talk about. AI and generative AI, and I know we are moving from the retail section of Amazon and into the cloud and into AWS, but considering you work there for such while. AI obviously for retail, phenomenal, to those that maybe don't understand the difference between the two businesses, as I'm sure a lot of people listening won't, we've obviously got the retail part, Amazon.ie. You've got AWS. Give us a quick load down as to the, the difference between the two and how they work.

Yeah, so, we refer to Amazon as Amazon stores on the internally, so that would be anything B2C. So if you think about anything that you can buy or click or have delivered or download or stream, those are all on the Amazon side of the fence. And even within that side, it's like AI is all over everything that we're doing at the moment from both an internal perspective, but also from an external perspective.

So you'll see like AI supported customer reviews where it gives you a summary of the total thousands and thousands of review, it will pull out the AI summary on some of the websites, not on Amazon.ie yet. There's a, an AI assistant called Rufuss where you can say shopping for a 4-year-old boy. What kind of things do they like? And it will give you some product suggestions, which is amazing. We see customers really enjoy that.

And there's lots of innovation in AI for our operations and supply chain business as well. So thinking about how do we make the process safer? How do we anticipate when machines might be about to break, or various things like that where we're just optimizing across every single workflow using AI where we can.

And then on the AWS side, so that would be our cloud business. So I think that's probably the one that maybe the general public know less about, but Amazon is a huge cloud provider and within that side of the business, a lot of what we're doing is B2B. So we're working directly with big players in the industries on supporting them with their foundations for how they want to build. And that doesn't necessarily mean AI. That could be all computing, all storage, all of their businesses are going through that side of the fence. And over there there's a huge amount of innovation where we're working directly with different businesses on how they might like to think about using AI in their businesses in the future.

So it's all over everything. It's very exciting and it's moving at such a pace that even internally, we almost can't keep up with how much is happening and we're just absorbing new tools as they come and seeing where things get rolled out. And every other week we have another kind of AI inspiration session where somebody has done something incredible for customers or for their internal partner teams. It's amazing.

Wow, busy, busy. It's such a, a gigantic organization, but again, it's gorgeous to see that you are here in, in Dublin, but fascinating to hear about the different parts of the business there and and who you're helping and who you're supporting as well.

But look, last question, 'cause it's a biggie 'cause we're obviously coming into the biggest time of year, it's your first Christmas in Ireland for Amazon.ie. What's coming up next for you and the team?

Oh yeah, it's our year of first. So this is our first Q4, which is a big moment for Amazon of course. And we are deep in our Black Friday planning right now. So, you've caught me on a good week where we're all very excited to be reaching more customers and offering better value to customers and giving them access to more products.

So I think once we get through Black Friday week, we're then going into our first Christmas campaign, which I'm really excited for. So for this one, we, since we got the Amazon Ireland site, we've had a huge opportunity to do more with our local communities, which we couldn't really do until we had our own website. So we're working with Friends of the Elderly for our Christmas campaign this year, which is something we're all very passionate about. But, we're creating this gorgeous video with Oyin from The Traitors. I dunno if you watched The Traitors this year, but she's part of it as well. And we've got this amazing video and it's all about the connection and this time of year to make sure that people have the opportunity to connect and to reach out to people, whether that's just through sending a gift or sending a message or whatever it might be. Particularly for the elderly who maybe don't have their family as close to them or things like that. So that's coming next.

And then looking forward into: 2026

Amazing. Gosh. Just like that. It sounds exciting. Any predictions at all, as do you think, what people might be buying over the next weeks? Not asking for myself at all. Um, any idea what's kind of hot on, on the list for people?

Well, I've been looking as much as you have like a consumer, but we have amazing gift guides on our website at the moment, so you've got top brands for her, for him, for kids and things like that. I think what we're seeing a lot of is that people are really being intentional about how they want to think about what they're buying this year.

We're supporting by making sure that people can get access to as much information to make the right decision based on who they're buying for. But I think like the jury's out on what exactly we're gonna see as the top sellers just yet.

the right way. But amazing in: 2026

Well, look, we've learned so much today. I certainly have. And if you've enjoyed today's podcast episode, please do share it from any of the podcast platforms with your network. And if you're on social media, tag me, Melissa Moore and the Retail Tea Break podcast. You can listen back to all previous eight seasons on your favorite podcast platform. While you there, hit that follow button so that you get to listen first every week. You can, of course, watch us over on YouTube and subscribe to the Retail Tea Break podcast.

nna say as a prelude to March: 2026

Thank you, Melissa. It's been great.

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112. Inside Amazon: What Amazon.ie Reveals About Retail’s Future