You’re such a smart man Keith and a valuable asset to the UA-cam community. You still can’t beat a standalone business premises and let your good name be spread by word of mouth purely based on quality of service and product
Very true. I honestly didn't expect how I'd have to market would change so much from early tests. I really though I could not focus on raising money and build through products slowly and scale up. I was wrong. Stick to my day job and things I'm good at for now. If I ever venture back into trying I now know where I am deficient and need to find people to fulfill those roles.
> "Processing fees... I can't do anything about that..." If you set up the right system to do the paperwork (Import One Stop Shop) on your end, the end user does not have to pay what amounts to extortion fees by our post offices. I'm not saying it's easy or free, but it could be worth the effort if you're shipping enough to the EU that you have to start shipping with couriers to resolve issues instead of the national mail providers.
My memory on this is a bit fuzzy but this is what I remember. My first step was to register in some fashion but the eu had not finalized single registration methods for all the eu, so at the time you had to register in every single country you'd ship to. Every single one was going to be different. Consultants told me about 1200 to 2000 euro per country to get this tax registration sorted as a foreigner. Basically said for me to wait if I wanted to do direct shipments or find a company that would do the bulk import and ship from within the Eu. Probably what you described? However most companies want about 30 to 40 percent to do this. We already saw that things started going bad with marketing costs when algorithms got rejigged. Maybe if I had the right knowledge or people who knew they could sort it out. But this was really the problem. The "it's just one more thing". There was a reason I didn't keep adding more things to my plate. Things were falling. I was basically doing the job of four or five people for zero dollars while consulting to keep it afloat. Just one more part time job on that?
@@kwakeham Oh yea, the old system was you had to register in every single country. Now (I think since 2021) there is a system (IOSS) by which you only have to register in 1 EU jurisdiction and get a single VAT invoice per month. You do need some intermediary/fiscal representative, but only for tax reasons. They have nothing to do with the goods (no bulk import etc). This is generally recommended if you have enough volume to justify the cost of the intermediary/fiscal representative. Depending on your volume this whole thing can be set up for 1€ to 0.30€ per order now, although some places will charge a set up or monthly fee, most include some volume of orders with that. A good partner will have integrations with many e-commerce platforms, so if you're using something like that, you don't have to do any work per order after setting it up. I'm not posting this to saying you didn't do enough work already :) Just wanted to let others know that there might be options suitable to them in case they also struggle.
You’re such a smart man Keith and a valuable asset to the UA-cam community. You still can’t beat a standalone business premises and let your good name be spread by word of mouth purely based on quality of service and product
Very true. I honestly didn't expect how I'd have to market would change so much from early tests. I really though I could not focus on raising money and build through products slowly and scale up. I was wrong. Stick to my day job and things I'm good at for now. If I ever venture back into trying I now know where I am deficient and need to find people to fulfill those roles.
Thank you so much for sharing this, Keith.
> "Processing fees... I can't do anything about that..."
If you set up the right system to do the paperwork (Import One Stop Shop) on your end, the end user does not have to pay what amounts to extortion fees by our post offices.
I'm not saying it's easy or free, but it could be worth the effort if you're shipping enough to the EU that you have to start shipping with couriers to resolve issues instead of the national mail providers.
My memory on this is a bit fuzzy but this is what I remember. My first step was to register in some fashion but the eu had not finalized single registration methods for all the eu, so at the time you had to register in every single country you'd ship to. Every single one was going to be different. Consultants told me about 1200 to 2000 euro per country to get this tax registration sorted as a foreigner. Basically said for me to wait if I wanted to do direct shipments or find a company that would do the bulk import and ship from within the Eu. Probably what you described? However most companies want about 30 to 40 percent to do this. We already saw that things started going bad with marketing costs when algorithms got rejigged.
Maybe if I had the right knowledge or people who knew they could sort it out. But this was really the problem. The "it's just one more thing". There was a reason I didn't keep adding more things to my plate. Things were falling. I was basically doing the job of four or five people for zero dollars while consulting to keep it afloat. Just one more part time job on that?
@@kwakeham Oh yea, the old system was you had to register in every single country. Now (I think since 2021) there is a system (IOSS) by which you only have to register in 1 EU jurisdiction and get a single VAT invoice per month. You do need some intermediary/fiscal representative, but only for tax reasons. They have nothing to do with the goods (no bulk import etc). This is generally recommended if you have enough volume to justify the cost of the intermediary/fiscal representative.
Depending on your volume this whole thing can be set up for 1€ to 0.30€ per order now, although some places will charge a set up or monthly fee, most include some volume of orders with that. A good partner will have integrations with many e-commerce platforms, so if you're using something like that, you don't have to do any work per order after setting it up.
I'm not posting this to saying you didn't do enough work already :) Just wanted to let others know that there might be options suitable to them in case they also struggle.