Amazon in Europe isn't one reward, it's 11. What that means for global reward programs.

Gift cards for Amazon.com feel like a quick, no-brainer way to cover all of your bases when sending rewards to people in Europe. On Amazon.com, recipients can choose from millions of products and have them delivered right to their doorstep. Meanwhile, you can check “recipient rewards” off your to-do list with a single gift card, right?

Our data tells a different story.

Amazon is more than just Amazon.com. The brand actually runs multiple storefronts (more than 20 across the world), and Europeans regularly use at least 11 of them. But storefronts don’t always match the countries they’re used in, and some markets rarely choose Amazon gift cards at all. 

To make things even more complicated, Amazon gift cards from one storefront aren’t transferable to another. Send someone in Italy a gift card from Amazon.de (Germany) instead of Amazon.it, and you'll have one disappointed recipient.

The TL;DR? Amazon probably isn’t the easiest way to ensure every European reward recipient gets the reward they want.

One brand, 11 storefronts

Amazon is one of the top incentive choices in the U.S. And if you live in this country, you shop from the Amazon.com storefront. But if you live in a European country, you might open Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, or another variation. Each one of these storefronts is a distinct shopping experience with its own products, currency, shipping footprint. Each one also has its own gift cards. 

When businesses send rewards through Tremendous, they can give recipients access to gift cards from multiple Amazon storefronts. Our reward redemption data shows that recipients in 30 European countries who choose Amazon sometimes go for Amazon.com. But that storefront is almost never the top choice in Europe. Instead, European recipients more often choose from one of the 11 dedicated European storefronts: 

1. Belgium: amazon.com.be

2. France: amazon.fr 

3. Germany: amazon.de 

4. Italy: amazon.it 

5. Netherlands: amazon.nl 

6. Poland: amazon.pl 

7. Spain: amazon.es 

8. Sweden: amazon.se 

9. United Kingdom: amazon.co.uk

10. Ireland: amazon.ie 

11. Turkey (Türkiye): amazon.com.tr 

(Note that the Amazon storefronts for Ireland and Turkey are not currently available through the Tremendous catalog, which may have affected redemption data for those two countries in this article.) 

This is why offering "Amazon gift cards" to other countries can be more operationally complex than you might think. 

If you run a program that sends rewards to people in Europe and you want to give them an Amazon gift card, you’ll need to carefully choose the right one. If you don’t, then the recipient could face constraints like limited products, high tariffs, and delivery delays from shopping through an international version of Amazon. And that negative experience risks chipping away at the value of your rewards and your reputation.

Recipients opt for the Amazon storefront they can access, not necessarily the one you'd expect

With just 11 storefronts native to Europe, several variants cover multiple countries. A few storefronts cover lots of countries. Like Amazon.co.uk, which cracks the top 15 redemption types in 21 European countries other than the UK itself, including:

• Albania

• Bosnia and Herzegovina

• Bulgaria

• Croatia

• Cyprus

• Czechia

• Estonia

• Greece

• Hungary

• Ireland

• Latvia

• Lithuania

• Luxembourg

• Malta

• Moldova

• North Macedonia

• Portugal

• Serbia

• Slovakia

• Slovenia

• Spain 

But it’s only the top Amazon choice in the UK (ok, we saw that one coming), Slovakia, Malta, and Ireland.

Amazon.de (Germany’s storefront) is also popular. It’s the top gift-card choice in Germany, of course, accounting for 13% of redemptions, but Luxembourgers (30%) and Austrians (16%) dig it even more. It’s also the top Amazon choice in places that don’t love Amazon as a redemption choice in general: 

• Cyprus (8%)

• Lithuania (5%)

• Bulgaria (4%)

• Czechia (2%)

• Estonia (2%)

• Denmark (0.6%)

• Finland (0.1%)

But before you open gift card accounts at the top handful of Amazon storefronts, check this out: Countries like Albania, Luxembourg, and Malta have at least five storefronts in their top 15 redemption choices. 

Meanwhile, Austrians made at least 80 redemptions for Amazon.jp (Japan’s storefront). 

Europeans seem to order from whichever Amazon storefront makes the most sense for them, and that’s not always the one you’d expect. It’s an Amazon jungle out there, and trying to choose one or even a few storefronts for delivering rewards in Europe is bound to leave some international frustration in your wake.

Amazon still isn’t as good as cash

People value choice, and most prefer cash and cash equivalents higher than any single retailer’s gift card. Because it offers so many products, Amazon is about as close to that flexibility as any one store can get. But it’s still not cold, hard cash.

One place that preference shows up is when Europeans redeem larger rewards. For most people, Amazon isn’t the place to spend large rewards. In at least 16 European countries, bank transfers have the highest average redemption value, and they consistently breach the top 3 in most other places in Europe. Amazon.de makes the cut in a few countries, but these are outliers. The average Amazon redemption in Europe sits at around $24, while bank transfers land around $81, nearly four times higher.

In total, Amazon makes up just 20% of the rewards landscape in Europe by dollar volume. Meanwhile, PayPal accounts for 52%, Visa 12%, and bank transfers 2%. Miscellaneous other retailers make up the other 13%.

In some markets, Amazon barely registers

Amazon isn’t the only way to send gift cards internationally. If we zoom out of Jeff Bezos’ empire for a minute, we can see that Amazon is just one part of a larger rewards landscape. And often, it’s not the top dog. The Titans of European rewards redemption are actually even more brand-agnostic: PayPal and Visa. So if you aren’t offering these, you could be disappointing most of your recipients.

Amazon variants are typically between 0.1% and 25% of redemptions across Europe. (The outlier is Luxembourgers, who chose an Amazon variant nearly 50% of the time.) If Amazon’s all you offer, you’re likely pushing at least 75% of recipients into an option they don’t really want. 

In at least one European country, not a single Amazon storefront cracks the top 15 redemptions. After PayPal and Visa gobble up 81% of redemptions in Norway, individual retailers swoop in and eat up the rest.

If you’re looking for gift cards redeemable in a specific country, filter the Tremendous catalog by location to examine the options.

What this means for global reward programs

Amazon is a popular part of any incentive offering, but it’s not going to cover all of your European rewards singlehandedly. No one storefront or brand will. Instead, reward choice is the best value: let recipients pick the storefront, currency, or payout method that actually works for them. 

Methodology

All redemption data comes from anonymized redemption tracking on the Tremendous platform, pulled June 2026. We looked at the top 15 redemption choices in each of 35 European countries, ranked by number of redemptions per redemption type. Percentages reflect each option's share of a country's total redemptions; Europe-wide landscape figures reflect share of total dollars redeemed.