4 ms·
Ask YC: Are Americans forgetting the rest of the world?
I often encounter sites that basically assume you're living in America - many requiring you to have valid American credentials (state, zip, phonenumber, etc) to sign up. This is not only something that occurs on small sites, AOL is an example of one of the bigger sites doing it - (https://new.aol.com/freeaolweb/)
Why is this? It seems to me that American companies are missing a lot of business this way. Is there a reason for it, or are American companies just ignoring the rest of the world?
- edw519 19y agoOversight
- mixmax 19y agoexplain...
- tomh 19y agoWhen all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Therefore, when all you've got is a dev and management team that doesn't have an office outside the US, everything looks like a US-targeted website. Besides, haven't you heard of all the credit card scammers outside the US? Boo, scary.
- david927 19y agoBecause Europe alone is a much bigger market than the US, and it's not that hard to simply localize an app. I think this is a huge market -- localizing the most successful apps out there. In fact, you can get the users to do it for you. Just open the admin to allow for translated versions of pages. Big oversight. Big opportunity.
- tim2 19y agoTo only localize is to fail on so many levels.
- jgrahamc 19y agoThe US is itself a huge market with relatively uniformity (you mention the address information as one example, the currency is another). I don't see anything wrong with a US company deciding that US customers are reasonable target. Yes, they are missing out on business, but they are also missing out on hassles with deal with the RotW. So my take is that for many US companies the answer is "Why bother? We have a big market here".
- swombat 19y agoOversight and pragmatism. You have to start somewhere - and it's usually quite sensible to start with the biggest market, and then expand to the smaller ones.
- mixmax 19y agoAbsolutely. But a company the size of AOL surely can't make the excuse that they have to start somewhere. According to internetworldstats North America is only 18% of the global market. Even Europe is bigger with 26%. Sourse: (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm)
- dgabriel 19y agoThere are also liability issues. This service is offered to US citizens only, possibly because their billing practices don't conform to laws of other nations. Localization of legal issues is costly and time consuming. If you examine the member agreement linked on that page, you see the following: 3. QUALIFICATIONS FOR MEMBERSHIP To use the AOL Services, you must be a U.S. resident and legally able to enter into contracts. AOL reserves the right to limit you to one free trial or promotion of a paid subscription plan that cannot be combined with other offers.
- mixmax 19y agoWell if startups from small European countries can deal with that, the I'm sure large American companies can as well. If they choose to do so of course.
- dgabriel 19y agoThey can, for sure, and many of them do (just not all of them). It's a decision based on the cost of legal vs. the income benefit of providing services to the international market. AOL has apparently decided the US is its target market. You can get better free web mail from other sites, anyway. :)
- davidw 19y agoLook at it as an opportunity to get into other markets first, as an entrepreneur:-) There are lots of "copycat" sites making good money in their home countries.
- mixmax 19y agoTrue. Here's an example: In Denmark bask in the 90's a couple of guys decided to do a site like yahoo. It was called jubii. Today they are much bigger than Yahoo in Denmark, and are making good money, basically riping off Yahoo's concept.
- aggieben 19y agoUh...AOL = America OnLine. Point taken, but AOL isn't a great example - it started when Americans really were (practically speaking) the only netizens (and overseas connections were expensive).
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- noonespecial 19y agoThere is still quite a bit of friction at the borders. As a company that ships equipment both into and out of America, we still find it difficult/expensive to get goods and money into and out of this country. Actually difficult to the point that a profitable product in US is not profitable outside because the profit margin is more than absorbed by the cost of getting the goods out of the country and getting the payment back in. Instead we've had to set up a rather convoluted system where our hardware is sourced and assembled outside of the US. It was so much of a pain that I can easily see why some people might just decide its not worth the hassle. The economy may be global now, but if you're not in Asia or eastern Europe, your country didn't get the memo.
- german 19y agoYou are doing the same thing here in this post. America and US are two different things.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- wheels 19y agoIn English, "America" is the correct short for for the United States of America, and "Americans" for the residents. That's not true in other languages languages (Spanish, for example). I assume your moniker is less than accurate as in German "Amerika" and "Amerikaner(in)" are standard terms as well.
- hernan7 19y agoYes, in English: America = US. In Spanish: America = The Americas.
- german 19y agoI didn't knew that, thanks a lot for the info. Edit: just another question. What about American like saying European?
- xirium 19y agoThere's a similar example in Europe, but much more benign and regarding the water between England and France. In English it is known as the English Channel. In French, it is known as The Channel.
- anidealworld 19y agoWell, if you were from the country most commonly known as "Mexico" you would really be from "The United States of Mexico". Therefore it makes more sense to call you a Mexican than an American.
- piers 19y ago<slightly off topic> The thing that gets me is that there are a lot of US companies that expect people to use credit cards. I'm guessing that this is because (AFAIK) most US citizens have credit cards. However, over here in the UK (rest of Europe too? I don't know) credit cards aren't so prolific. I wish people would start allowing more international forms of payment, such as PayPal. I REALLY want to start using the paid versions of some of 37 Signals stuff as well as some of the Amazon Web Services, but I can't because they don't accept Paypal (or something similar). The thing that gets me is that I can buy something online via Amazon, but can't use their web services. </rant>
- wheels 19y agoThis seems pretty obvious to me (as a european resident). The amount of stuff you have to figure out to reach the US market is a lot less than the amount of stuff you have to figure out to reach the european market. That's a lot of the impetus for tighter european economic integration. If the cost of reaching the US market is a fraction of the cost of reaching the combined european market, it doesn't matter if there are a few more people in the EU. You also can't really measure online market size by GDP or pure head count. Some corners of the EU (Bulgaria, for instance) are less developed than Mexico.
- hernan7 19y agoMaybe in the case of AOL they offer those free email accounts to Americans only so they can guarantee a more homogeneous audience to their advertisers.
- pelle 19y agoIt's a problem mainly of ignorance. Both with regards to requiring zip and state and also with the whole liability problem. The liability issue is only a problem for a few types of businesses, in particularly financial. You may offend or break laws (such as EU privacy laws), but it really doesn't matter if you're a US company without offices in an EU jurisdiction as they don't have jurisdiction over you, no matter what they say. It is very easy to make a signup form internationally compliant. You just have to do zip/postalcode, state/province/region. Also don't make any of the address fields required unless you need them for shipping purposes.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- theogeer 19y agoI think there is something more insidious at work here. Well, perhaps not Insidious, but it's not about companies trying to exclude people, at least not in large. In honesty I think there are two culprits. 1) Stupid Developers. There are lots of developers out there who are lazy and stupid in the bad way. They just go with what they know and don't even begin to consider a larger audience. Think of all the uber-limited lists of job field boxes, of the limited gender-identity options on sites, of the idiocy of requiring an address for registration to a newspapers comments in the first place! 2) Ignorant or unthinking management. People who make the developers require all that stupid information in the first place. They do it because they don't really understand that they're actively deterring business. It's a problem with business models all over. Business leaders often don't realize that they're making it hard for their customers, and that makes their customers unlikely to be customers for long. If someone would sit them down and explain to them the horrors of interface friction, and truly make them understand, I think things could get better quickly.
- xirium 19y agoThere's definitely a level of premature optimisation, although it is becoming less common. I've lost count of the times that I've encountered forms that only accept five digit postal codes or 10 digit telephone numbers. Take your business elsewhere and the problem will fix itself.