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How would you suggest going about overcoming these differences? I live in the EU. I've thought about this for some time and I can't really think of a scalable a

How would you suggest going about overcoming these differences? I live in the EU. I've thought about this for some time and I can't really think of a scalable approach. One aspect of the problem is taxes and regulations, which for the most part has to be addressed politically. The different jurisdictions are a cause for friction, too. The even more significant barrier however is the linguistic and cultural one. It's not sufficient to just translate a say English language website to French in order to start selling in France (and providing proper idiomatic translations for each of the main EU languages is difficult enough). There are cultural differences right down to which website designs are popular in any given EU country at a time. You often can tell where a website is 'located' just by looking at its design.

narag 10y ago
Then the opportunity could be creating a company that solves these problems for other companies.
- csl 10y ago
  So, a consultancy company then? Which we all know only scales with the number of employees. Most people in Europe use Gmail, right? So they must already have figured out this stuff.
  - narag 10y ago
    So, a consultancy company then? No.
  - matthewmacleod 10y ago
    No, I don't think that's necessary. It immediately seems like a platform specifically designed to support things like EU-wide compliance, marketing, payments and other business functions could potentially be beneficial to a wide variety of businesses.
  - fragmede 10y ago
    Selling Gmail (ad's or hosted apps) isn't intra-EU trade (in so far as Google's an American company headquartered in Mountain View, though they do have many offices in the EU). The implication of a consultancy company is that their work is done ad-hoc and in a one-off fashion, requiring lots of work from the company which stupidly only scales with the number of employees. Software that successfully automated away the most toilsome parts of the job, allowing a handful of people to support intra-EU between any of the 28 member countries would do quite well.
monodeldiablo 10y ago
I've been living in the EU (Croatia) now for three years and I'm honestly baffled that people here think that these are legitimately barriers to trade. As another commenter noted: We're all using GMail and AirBnB and Etsy, despite our "cultural differences". I think that, in the quest for a cheaper laptop, people won't care much that the product description isn't a grammatically perfect rendering of their local Norwegian subdialect. In fact, I bet a site that mandated English (I know, shudder all you want, but it's true) as the language for sellers would mop up here. Everybody 40 and younger (AKA "your target market") speaks/reads English flawlessly. Taxes and regulations? Big problem. Totally agree with you. This is probably what's kept Amazon such a bit player in Europe. Cultural and linguistic differences? Not a major issue.
dx034 10y ago
Taxes and regulations shouldn't be a problem. If you send an article from Croatia to Germany, you won't have to worry about any regulations or taxes that are different from sending it within Croatia. But any non-express parcel will take 3+ days and cost at least 3x as much, which is why people prefer to buy domestic.

narag 10y ago

Then the opportunity could be creating a company that solves these problems for other companies.

csl 10y ago
So, a consultancy company then? Which we all know only scales with the number of employees. Most people in Europe use Gmail, right? So they must already have figured out this stuff.
- narag 10y ago
  So, a consultancy company then? No.
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  No, I don't think that's necessary. It immediately seems like a platform specifically designed to support things like EU-wide compliance, marketing, payments and other business functions could potentially be beneficial to a wide variety of businesses.
- fragmede 10y ago
  Selling Gmail (ad's or hosted apps) isn't intra-EU trade (in so far as Google's an American company headquartered in Mountain View, though they do have many offices in the EU). The implication of a consultancy company is that their work is done ad-hoc and in a one-off fashion, requiring lots of work from the company which stupidly only scales with the number of employees. Software that successfully automated away the most toilsome parts of the job, allowing a handful of people to support intra-EU between any of the 28 member countries would do quite well.

monodeldiablo 10y ago

I've been living in the EU (Croatia) now for three years and I'm honestly baffled that people here think that these are legitimately barriers to trade. As another commenter noted: We're all using GMail and AirBnB and Etsy, despite our "cultural differences". I think that, in the quest for a cheaper laptop, people won't care much that the product description isn't a grammatically perfect rendering of their local Norwegian subdialect. In fact, I bet a site that mandated English (I know, shudder all you want, but it's true) as the language for sellers would mop up here. Everybody 40 and younger (AKA "your target market") speaks/reads English flawlessly. Taxes and regulations? Big problem. Totally agree with you. This is probably what's kept Amazon such a bit player in Europe. Cultural and linguistic differences? Not a major issue.

dx034 10y ago

Taxes and regulations shouldn't be a problem. If you send an article from Croatia to Germany, you won't have to worry about any regulations or taxes that are different from sending it within Croatia. But any non-express parcel will take 3+ days and cost at least 3x as much, which is why people prefer to buy domestic.