Amazon Sellers, How Selling Internationally into the UK & Germany will help your business HD

Hello and my name is Gianni Munday the MD of Extra Direct (http://extradirect.co.uk), a specialist business service provider for non-UK resident directors and shareholders of a UK limited company. Today I’m talking about why expand your Amazon or online business Internationally into the UK or EU? There are many reasons why to expand your business Internationally and if you are not doing so already, start with the UK and parts of the EU. I will try not to systematically go through them all one by one but talk more generically about some of the real benefits of exploiting a unsaturated market that is way behind the USA in it’s development but that offers far greater rewards. First, it will be very easy to expand as you will have already done 99% of the work as you already have products to sell, so would have gone through the sourcing, manufacturing, shipping and development of any product, so it’s only really a case of switching locations. There’s also no need to jump into having all your products translated until such a time as you have some positive results and feel it will be of some real value to you. Then there’s the argument that the UK and especially Germany currently offers far greater opportunity than the USA as the market there is becoming saturated with sellers where as in the UK & EU we have fewer sellers and the ones that do sell here are often not quite as efficient or advanced when it comes to how to sell on Amazon, so you will quite often easily be able to out sell and of your European counterparts. By using a UK entity you have immediate access to the rest of the EU and shipping your goods here will allow you to fulfil directly here and into the EU using FBA, making things considerably stress free. When I’ve spoken to many of very established and experienced American Amazon sellers about expanding into the the UK or EU, the one thing they have all said was they are very ‘scared’ or wary of VAT and any other regulatory requirements, well again, that is only about knowledge and we have access to everything from registering your new company, managing any VAT registration requirements to dealing with HMRC, so whilst for a foreigner that may sound daunting, when you are here and know the system, it’s simply a process we can manage for you. Talking about VAT, there could also be some real benefits of using a UK registered company as there is no immediate requirement to register or collect VAT on your sales until you have sold more than around £85,000 of goods (of course note the date of this presentation as that could have changed!) allowing you to possibly take some early advantage of your more established competitors. Have you thought about protecting your business? Expanding into another territory like the UK & EU will help you protect your current business in an every increasing competitive market, so whilst those are frantically trying to catch you up in your home country, you are busy expanding your business elsewhere mea