Cambodia is considering selling its products through global giant Amazon.

Cambodia wants to expand sales of local products on the world’s largest online marketplace, Amazon. To that end, Ministry of Commerce officials met with Amazon representatives last week to discuss the possibility.

In a recent social media post, the ministry said the meeting was attended by Chea Ratha, the ministry’s secretary of state, and Darren Ong, a senior manager for public policy at Amazon. Also present was Chann Sokros, an economics and trade specialist at the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh.

“The meeting aimed to discuss cooperation opportunities between Cambodia and Amazon to promote Cambodian products on Amazon’s e-commerce platform and promote the development of digital business, digital services and the promotion of digital economy between Cambodia and Amazon,” the post reads.

Amazon is the world’s largest e-commerce platform, with almost 4.8 billion visits per year.

Ministry spokesman Sok Sopheak did not respond to questions from The Post about whether the meeting had yielded any concrete results.

Hong Vanak, an economic researcher at the Royal Academy of Cambodia, believes that such promotions are very important, but only if the quality of the product is guaranteed. He suggested that the first step should be to ensure that each product has an excellent reputation in local markets and among foreign visitors. Once this is ensured, they should be advertised on popular online marketplaces such as Amazon.

He added that before entering the international online market, one should assess how popular a given product will be among international consumers.

“In my opinion, if we go directly to the big international online markets without advertising widely in local markets, we risk losing out. Just being there will cost a lot of money, and we may get a low return on that investment because our products are unknown,” he explained.

He believed that Amazon could play an important role in the development of Cambodian products as the two countries have excellent relations and Amazon has a very large reach, meaning that products from the Kingdom could be sold in many new markets.

Currently, a variety of Cambodian products can be purchased on Chinese website Alibaba, including pepper, dried snacks, cashew nuts, mango jam and dried longan.