You're already shipping to Europe. Start operating in it.
The UK, Germany and the Netherlands hold roughly 145 million online shoppers between them, and your European orders are probably being served today from a US warehouse. We move you to local stock, local checkout and local delivery, and we handle the tax and product requirements underneath. Your own store and the open marketplaces are available to a US company now. The gated ones we work on alongside them. All three markets are in the base package.
- Around 145 million online shoppers across the UK, Germany and the Netherlands
- All three markets included from day one, no per-country bolt-on
- VAT registration runs from 3 to 4 weeks in the Netherlands to 16 to 20 weeks in Germany
- Stock held in region at our Netherlands and UK warehouses
- Your own store, Amazon and eBay are open to a US company with no European entity
You’re at step one. Everything after it is shaped by what you decide here, because the market you pick sets your registration lead times, your packaging obligations, your carrier mix and your working capital. It also sets which sales channels are actually open to you, which is a separate question from compliance and one this page answers directly. Below: the three markets we start most US brands in, and what each one asks of you.
Europe is not one market, and that is the whole advantage
Take the UK, Germany and the Netherlands together and you have somewhere in the region of 145 million people who buy online, in three of the most digitally mature economies anywhere. The UK is the largest ecommerce market in Europe and the third largest in the world behind China and the United States. Germany is the largest on the continent and contributes around 15% of European online retail revenue. The Netherlands is smaller but sits near the top of the European table for online shopper penetration, with 87% of 16 to 74 year olds having bought online in the last three months of 2025.
Growth is still real, too. UK and EU online purchases rose 18% in Q2 2025, with a 25% spike in June, and categories including garden products, homewares and fashion grew by as much as 48%. So the demand question is usually settled before a founder ever speaks to us. What isn’t settled is the operating model. Serving a German customer from a US warehouse means longer delivery, unfamiliar payment methods at checkout and a returns journey that crosses an ocean. Do that from stock held near Schiphol instead and you get next-day or two-day delivery, iDEAL and invoice payment at checkout, and a return that comes back to a local hub.
Then there’s the part that stops brands cold. Each of these three markets runs its own tax registration, its own producer responsibility schemes and its own product information rules, and the UK’s are wholly separate from the EU’s since Brexit. That is complicated. It is also the reason a single partner with one platform behind it beats assembling five vendors per country.
One more thing, and it is the piece most plans get wrong. Finishing the compliance work does not by itself get you onto every marketplace in a country. Some of the ones US brands most want are gated by the marketplace’s own admission rules rather than by law, and two of them cannot be reached by a US-incorporated company at all as things stand. That changes the order you do things in, not whether the opportunity is worth having.
How big is each one, really?
Founders tend to arrive with a rough sense that Germany is large and the Netherlands is small. Both are true, and neither tells you where to start. Scale sets the ceiling. Entry friction sets the timeline.
Annual online spending, ranked. Darker means larger, and the years and measurement scopes differ, so read this as relative scale rather than a like-for-like table.
The three are measured on different bases, so the chart shows relative scale rather than a common total. UK is online retail sales of £127.4bn in 2024, up 3.4%, converted at typical 2024 rates (ONS-derived). Germany is B2C ecommerce of €84.7bn in 2025 (ECDB/EHI). Netherlands is total online spending of €35.7bn in 2025 including services, down 1% overall while product spending rose 2% (Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor).
VAT registration lead time, the item that usually sets your launch date. Lighter means faster. Same scale as the market pages.
Germany’s figure is time after a complete submission has been made and verified. Allow two and a half to five months in practice once document gathering, certified German translations and follow-up requests are counted, and note that each follow-up request restarts the clock. Figures are typical ranges from our own registration data, offered as guidance rather than a guarantee for your application.
Three markets, three different jobs
Each of these gives you something the other two don’t. Most US brands we work with end up live in all three, and the order they go in is a commercial decision rather than a compliance one.
The familiar one
For most US brands the UK is the least strange place in Europe to land. English throughout, Amazon dominant, eBay a real second, and a consumer base of 62.1 million online shoppers where online already accounts for roughly 28% of total retail. Marketplace GMV reached £34.1bn in 2025, up 3.7%, which is around a third of all online retail spending. If you want a fast read on whether your product travels, this is where you get it cheapest.
UK shoppers are also unusually marketplace-led when they buy from abroad. 80% prefer a platform such as Amazon or Etsy for cross-border purchases, the highest rate among major Western markets, and only 18% go direct to a brand site. The UK is the one market on this page where that preference costs you nothing, because every significant channel here is open to a US company. Amazon.co.uk, eBay.co.uk and your own store, plus OnBuy, whose own seller page lists the United States among the countries it accepts, takes WorldFirst or Payoneer for payouts, and accepts Freepost or a collection service in place of a local returns address. Two things to plan for regardless of channel. Return rates in fashion and footwear are among the highest in Europe, so reverse logistics is a line in your model rather than an afterthought. And free shipping is the biggest single factor in cart completion, with 74% abandoning over unexpected shipping costs.
The rulebook is where founders get caught. Since Brexit the UK is a separate market from the EU in every respect that matters to you. Separate VAT registration, a separate UK Responsible Person appointment with a UK address, separate producer responsibility registration, and customs paperwork on every movement between Great Britain and the EU. There is no small-business turnover threshold protecting a non-resident seller either. The obligation can apply from your first sale or from the moment you hold stock in the UK. One distinction worth holding on to: OnBuy waiving a UK VAT number at registration is OnBuy’s own onboarding rule. UK VAT law is separate and unaffected by it, and it is the one that carries the liability.
The prize, and the hardest one to fake
Germany reached €84.7bn in B2C ecommerce in 2025 and has around 65 million active online shoppers. Marketplaces account for more than half of it and are where the growth is. Amazon.de leads by a wide margin, with marketplace GMV of €52bn in 2024, up 4.2%, and it is open to a US company. So is Kaufland, which sets real onboarding conditions and is scaling fast on price-competitive ranges across nine European sites.
The German channel map has one feature a US founder should know about before building a plan around it. Otto.de is the second largest marketplace, around €7bn GMV in FY 2024/25 across roughly 6,200 curated partners rather than an open catalogue, and it is a genuinely different customer base. Otto Market’s own published checklist admits only companies with a registered office and a national legal form in Germany, the Netherlands or Poland, with Austria, France and Spain in pilot phases. A US-incorporated company is not on that list, and an entity is something only your own business can hold. So Otto is a question about how you are structured in Europe rather than a compliance task, and one we would rather work through with you before launch than after. Zalando is a separate case again: in its own words it is not possible to register interest or sign up, because Zalando approaches partners itself.
Checkout is where a US brand can quietly lose half the market. Cards are not dominant in Germany. PayPal holds 28.5%, invoice payment through Klarna or similar holds 25.8%, and direct debit another 17.3%, which leaves credit and debit cards on 12.3% combined. 82% of German shoppers will regularly abandon an order when their preferred method isn’t offered. Invoice payment means the customer receives the goods and pays 14 or 28 days later, which is unfamiliar to most US operators and non-negotiable here.
Returns are the highest in Europe and can exceed 50% in fashion. There is a statutory 14 day right of return on all consumer purchases, customers expect returns to be free, and around a quarter of returns come back through DHL’s Packstation locker network. On compliance, packaging producer responsibility under VerpackG applies from your first sale with no volume threshold, which means LUCID registration and dual system membership have to be in place before you sell rather than after. Both Amazon and Otto verify it. Accessibility is now live too: since 28 June 2025 the BFSG requires online shops to meet EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.1 Level AA and to publish a German-language accessibility statement, and the micro-enterprise exemption only covers businesses with fewer than 10 staff and turnover of at most €2m, so brands at our client scale are in scope.
Start here if you want to be live this quarter
Dutch online spending was €35.7bn in 2025 across 347 million transactions. The headline was down 1%, entirely because of services such as travel and events, while product spending grew 2%, the first product-side growth since the post-pandemic correction. Ecommerce is 18.3% of total Dutch retail against a European average of 14.7%. This is a mature market rather than a fast-growing one, which means margin discipline matters more than land grabs. What it offers instead is speed: VAT registration in three to four weeks, the quickest route in the EU, and our own warehouse near Schiphol Airport with road and air access to Germany and the rest of the EU from day one.
The channel picture needs care here, because the largest marketplace is also the one you cannot simply sign up to. bol.com dominates: 78% household penetration and around 86 million monthly visitors, owned by Ahold Delhaize. It does not require a Dutch entity, and it does not require an EU entity either. bol maintains a partner category and its own invoicing rules for companies established outside the EU, and its Logistics via bol documentation describes the sort of structure we deliver. What bol has never had is an open registration route. Sellers based outside Europe apply through a dedicated form, in a programme bol opened from mid-2025 and has deliberately kept small. bol’s own ecommerce director put it as quality being a requirement rather than a promise, with roughly the first hundred non-EU sellers expected in the first year. Two further bol conditions matter at the planning stage: a bank account in a SEPA country in your company’s name, so a US account will not do, and your own Dutch VAT number if you want to hold stock in bol’s Dutch warehouse, since an OSS number from another member state is not accepted. A fiscal representative can hold and file that Dutch registration in your name without you forming an entity.
So a Netherlands launch starts with the channels that are open, which is your own store plus Amazon.nl and eBay.nl. Amazon.nl joined Amazon’s Pan-EU FBA network in July 2025 and is growing. bol runs alongside as an application we prepare and submit with you, and the trading record, in-market stock and returns route you build on the open channels are what give it weight. At checkout, iDEAL carries 71% of online payments and account-to-account methods 64% overall, so a Dutch checkout without iDEAL will lose conversion whichever channel the customer came through.
A couple of things US brands routinely miss. Sinterklaas on 5 December is the major gifting peak and it is distinct from Christmas, so a calendar built on Western Christmas patterns arrives late. And Dutch is the language of the storefront even though English is widely understood, particularly for Amazon.nl listings, returns instructions and customer service. On producer responsibility, packaging registration is triggered at 50,000kg a year by weight, but single-use plastic packaging is in scope from the first unit, and WEEE, batteries and textiles all apply from day one. Under the PPWR the obligation arises in your customer’s member state, so holding stock in one country doesn’t confine your obligations to it.
Market figures come from our own country research, reviewed quarterly, with each source and its date held behind them. The UK cross-border figure is measured to 2022 and every other figure to 2024 or 2025. Where market-sizing scopes differ, the scope is stated in the chart note above. Regulatory positions were verified in August 2026. Producer responsibility processing times ran longer than usual across several countries through to at least mid-September 2026, so we build the live processing position into your plan rather than working from published averages.
What we handle for you
The work below is the same work whether you enter one market or all three. What changes is the volume of it.
Market selection you can defend
We run your product, your margin after landed cost, your operational bandwidth and your target markets through the Essential Expander Explorer™, the Explore stage of the Global Expansion Pathway™. You get a market order with reasoning attached, rather than a launch driven by whichever country sent the most orders last quarter.
Tax and product requirements, registered
VAT registration in every market you’re entering, plus OSS and IOSS guidance where they fit your model. Producer responsibility registrations, label and packaging review, and Responsible Person appointment for the EU and separately for the UK. All of it tracked in one place with filing handled inside the platform once your numbers are issued.
Stock where your customers are
Your inventory sits at our Netherlands warehouse near Schiphol Airport for EU orders and at our UK warehouses for UK orders, which keeps the two customs regimes cleanly separated. Orders ship locally, returns come back locally, and reworks such as relabelling happen in region instead of crossing the Atlantic twice.
Your store and the open channels, live together
Catalogue import, translation and listing setup across your own store, Amazon, eBay, OnBuy and Kaufland, managed centrally so a price or stock change is made once. Where a channel is gated we help you meet its operating conditions and work the application alongside the channels already earning. Inventory, orders and reporting for Europe sit next to the US channels you already run.
Compliance is necessary. It is not sufficient.
Three different kinds of obstacle sit between a US brand and a European sale, and they get talked about as though they were one thing. Separating them is the difference between a plan that works and a plan that stalls in month four.
The law
VAT registration, producer responsibility, GPSR responsible person, EORI, customs. These apply whatever channel you sell through, they are satisfiable, and they are the core of what we do.
The marketplace's operating conditions
A SEPA bank account, an in-market return address, national-language listings and customer service, named carriers, GTINs. Each marketplace sets its own. Nearly all of them a provider can satisfy for you.
Admission
A required legal entity in a named country, an invitation-only route, a capped application programme, a listing cap. Doing the compliance work faster does not move these. They need planning around instead.
Which channels can you actually open?
Ordered by what is available to a US-incorporated company today, because that is the order the revenue arrives in. Every rule below is the marketplace’s own policy rather than law, and is attributed accordingly.
Start here. This is where the first revenue is.
None of these need you to form a European company. What they need is the tax and compliance setup, the listings and integration work, in-market stock and a returns route, which is the work we do.
The only channel nobody approves, suspends or sets the timetable for. It carries the margin a marketplace takes, it holds the customer relationship, and its growth curve is yours. Localised language, local payment methods, local delivery and returns expectations, stock already in region. Treat it as a day-one channel rather than something you get to after the marketplaces.
Amazon’s own position is that a business outside Europe may not be required to form a Europe-based company to sell in Europe, though it notes there can be advantages to doing so. Category and brand gating still applies product by product, which is a separate decision inside an account you can already open.
No entity requirement. eBay asks for accurate account data including legal entity name, VAT numbers and where goods ship from, and acts as deemed supplier for defined non-EU seller cases.
Lists the United States among its accepted seller countries, takes WorldFirst or Payoneer for payouts, and accepts Freepost or a collection service instead of a local returns address. OnBuy also says a US seller not already UK VAT registered does not need a UK VAT number for OnBuy’s own purposes. Treat that as an onboarding rule rather than a tax position: UK VAT law is separate and carries the liability, and we set that side up properly regardless of what any single channel asks for at signup.
No entity requirement, and non-EU sellers are contemplated explicitly. The conditions are real but provider-satisfiable: a country-specific VAT ID for each sales channel, a returns address inside the EU, product data and legal texts in each site’s national language, and an EU responsible person for CE products made outside the EU, which Kaufland enforces as a blocking field at registration.
Worth pursuing, worth being realistic about
Neither of these needs a European entity from a seller established outside Europe. Both decide for themselves who gets in, and neither runs to your timetable, so we plan them as applications rather than as launches with a date on them. What moves the odds is evidence: trading history, in-market stock, a returns route that works and clean compliance behind it. That is exactly what the open channels build while the application is in progress, which is why we sequence them this way round.
No Dutch or EU entity needed. Sellers based outside Europe apply through a dedicated form, in a programme bol opened from mid-2025 and has kept deliberately small. Also required: a SEPA bank account in your company’s name, and your own Dutch VAT number to hold stock in bol’s Dutch warehouse, which a fiscal representative can hold and file for you. If you have read that bol requires an EU company, that condition belongs to bol’s separate EU partner track and does not apply to a US seller.
Cdiscount keeps its acceptance criteria confidential and assesses applications case by case, so what you can influence is how well the application presents your brand, your category fit and your operating setup. We structure it with you and confirm Cdiscount’s current position at the time you apply. A euro account with a visible IBAN and BIC is required, and listings and buyer support run in French.
Two channels that come down to how you are structured in Europe
Otto Market’s published checklist admits only companies with a registered office and a national legal form in Germany, the Netherlands or Poland, with Austria, France and Spain in pilot. German VAT registration, German stock and a German warehouse do not change it, and an entity is something only your own business can hold. A German company is not required if you hold an accepted form elsewhere on the list, which is why Otto tends to come up as a Dutch structuring question rather than a German one. If Otto matters to your category, bring it into the conversation at the planning stage. We work through the options with you while they are still cheap to act on.
In Zalando’s own words, it is not possible to register interest in or sign up to sell on Zalando, because Zalando approaches partners itself with an offer. No entity, VAT registration or warehouse arrangement changes that, so any checklist presenting Zalando as an application process is misleading by framing.
Every rule above is taken from the marketplace’s own seller documentation and was verified on 27 August 2026. Several of these policies moved during 2026, so we track them and confirm the current position for your markets as part of your plan. Beyond the base package the same principle applies: Allegro publishes a registration route for sellers established outside the EEA, capped at one account and 500 offers, and France is covered above.
What this looks like for brands like yours
The market picture is the same for everyone. The pressure points move depending on what you sell.
Ranges that span apparel and hardgoods pick up packaging and textiles obligations at the same time, and if anything in the range is aimed at children the product safety picture changes again. Germany’s returns profile hits activewear hard.
Ingredient permissions and claim wording are the long lead item, ahead of anything logistical. Germany’s health and wellness category grew 4.4% and is one of its stronger performers, so the work pays back.
The documentation set is the heaviest of any category, and the UK and EU need separate Responsible Person appointments. TikTok Shop has become a serious beauty channel in the UK, which changes the launch sequence.
Bulky and seasonal ranges make the launch date immovable, so a 16 to 20 week German VAT registration has to be started from the buying calendar backwards. Dutch home and living spending grew 12% and DIY and garden 11%.
WEEE applies from day one, any product containing a battery of any kind needs assessing including cells that only retain memory, and CE marking in Great Britain runs on its own recognition list. Amazon.de and Kaufland are open routes in Germany, so the compliance work is the gating item rather than access.
Fashion is the largest online category in the UK at 29% to 38% of revenue, and it is also where return rates are highest in both the UK and Germany. In-region returns processing changes the unit economics rather than just the customer experience.
Three markets should not mean three of everything
The default way to expand is to stack partners. One for tax, one for freight, one for producer responsibility, one for marketplace listings, one for reporting. Five partners across three countries is fifteen relationships, fifteen invoices and no single view of what’s actually happening. Andy Hooper’s word for the alternative is simplicity, and it’s the last stage of the Global Expansion Pathway™ for a reason: it’s what the other five stages are building toward.
Expandly is one platform behind all of it. Your VAT numbers, producer responsibility registrations, stock positions, orders, listings and market-by-market performance sit in the same system. And it isn’t a Europe-only add-on. The Amazon US and direct orders you already run appear in the same dashboard, so you’re comparing markets rather than reconciling tools.
It also means your own store and your marketplace channels are managed from the same catalogue and the same stock pool, which matters more than it sounds. The store is the channel you keep whatever a marketplace decides, so it should never be the one running on a separate system.
Market entry is the visible part. Every Expandly customer also gets:
Registration and ongoing filing across every market you sell in, with label and Responsible Person work alongside it.
Stock levels stay correct across every channel and every country, managed centrally.
Product content adapted for German and Dutch as well as English, pushed out from one catalogue.
Performance market by market and channel by channel, not one blended figure.
Automatic flags for filing deadlines, stock events and trading milestones.
Stock forecasting and opportunity planning, built into the platform.
Connect your existing tech stack without a rebuild.
Enrolment for every customer, plus the annual Expandly Roadshow.
Where market selection sits in your expansion
Choosing where to sell is the Explore stage, the first of six in the Global Expansion Pathway™, and the service behind it is the Essential Expander Explorer™. It comes first because the first market you enter shapes your logistics footprint, your compliance load, your working capital and your growth economics. Get the sequence right and each market makes the next one cheaper. Andy Hooper’s framing is that international doesn’t fix a business, it amplifies it.
Demand signals, specific countries rather than regions, size, competition and how goods actually reach the customer.
Brand and product fit, your internal bandwidth, capital available and contribution margin after freight, duties, returns and ads.
Currency exposure, regulatory stability, ease of importing and operating, and the trade position between here and there.
Translation that reads as local, systems readiness, whether your positioning lands, and product fit for the market.
A pre-scan of tax, product regulation, asset protection, payment flows and statutory obligations before you commit.
The Complexity Is Real.
If entering Europe were simple, the 145 million or so shoppers in these three markets would already be served by every US brand with product-market fit at home, and the margin would already be competed away. It isn’t simple. Three tax regimes, a UK framework that separated from the EU’s and keeps diverging, producer responsibility schemes that start at your first sale in one market and at a weight threshold in another, and a checkout that has to look native in three languages. On top of that, some of the marketplaces worth having decide for themselves who gets in, and a US company cannot buy its way past that with paperwork. All of it is a barrier, and a barrier you’ve cleared is an advantage your competitor still has to pay for.
- Market order chosen against your margin and bandwidth rather than last quarter's inbound orders
- Registrations started early enough that a 16 to 20 week German lead time never sets your launch date
- Stock held in region, so delivery promises and returns match what European customers already expect
- The UK and EU treated as the two separate regimes they are, from customs through to Responsible Person
- Local payment methods live at checkout, because iDEAL and invoice payment are not optional in their markets
- Channels opened in the order they are actually available, with your own store live from day one
- One platform and one team across all three, with country-level reporting instead of a blended number
We’ve taken more than 2,000 brands through this. The pattern we see is not that the winners spend the most. It’s that they set the foundations before they start shipping.
Online shoppers across the three markets in the Expandly base package.
UK and EU online purchases in Q2 2025, with a 25% spike in June and some categories up as much as 48%.
The spread in VAT registration lead time between the fastest and slowest of the three.
Choose your level of support
Every tier gets the same platform, the same onboarding process and the same three base markets. What changes is how much of the work sits with you and how much sits with us.
- Full platform, all three base markets, complete onboarding process
- Onboarding wizards and knowledgebase to work through each market yourself
- Email support when you get stuck
- Additional markets from £600 a month
- Dedicated onboarding manager, then a named success manager once live
- Quarterly business review and an annual compliance audit
- Warehouse tech fee included, preferential 3PL rates
- Additional markets from £400 a month
- VIP onboarding consultant, then a VIP success consultant
- Monthly business reviews and an annual consultant site visit
- Listings management and a tailored shipping plan
- Additional markets from £200 a month
All tiers: 36-month term. Base package includes the UK, Netherlands and Germany. Enterprise pricing is bespoke for high-volume, multi-market operators. Not sure which fits? Talk it through on your strategy call.
Find out what your first European market should be
Answer four questions and we’ll send you a market snapshot, an entry timeline and a compliance checklist built around your brand and your target markets.
This page is general guidance and not advice on your brand’s specific position. Marketplace access rules are each company’s own published policy and were verified on 27 August 2026. Tax, product and producer responsibility rules change and differ by market, so speak to our compliance team about how they apply to you before you make a filing, a registration or a launch decision.