Despite having many different languages, in some ways Europe is a more homogenous market than the US.
For example, an insurance business can operate freely across Europe with only one small piece of additional paperwork. I think it's actually an A4 piece of paper. In the US they'd have to be regulated separately by nearly every state.
French search in French, Germans in German, Danes in Danish, Spaniards in Spanish, Italians in Italian, Dutch in Dutch etc. Then, if your local language doesn't give you good results, you default to English.
Online shopping is mostly a local thing with Amazon as the prominent exception. Even in the market for plane tickets local websites dominate, meaning that a French person travelling from Paris to Berlin is likely to use a different website than a German guy travelling from Berlin to France. Again, the exceptions seem to be mostly American.
European countries even have their own payment solutions.
So how is this different from the current situation with Google dominating the market? Google works in French, German, Dutch, Spanish etc! You only need one company in based one country and they can work in all languages. And if they grow big, they setup offices in different countries, for country specific or language specific searching.
1. Slavic languages have heavy inflection. If Google doesn't understand all the possible forms of a word, it will give you poor results until you search again by changing your query slightly. 2. Google doesn't understand common synonyms, so it doesn't give results that contain synonyms. 3. Russian websites may not care about google rank as much as Yandex, so they might not even be indexed.
I don't know how, but there are thousands of websites I can find by searching Yandex for a certain thing that will not be on Google. It may be those three things combined, or other factors I didn't think of.
From our perspective the EU common marked is pretty much just a pipe dream. Being able to start a business in one EU country and just automatically have access to all of the 500million EU citizens would be awesome, but right now that not how it works.
I haven't done it but isn't the thing with the new VAT regulations that you can pay your taxes to one revenue service (and just register with one) and they will divide it according to your sales data (e.g. the customers country)?
Or do you mean that you have to pay VAT at all if you do this? In this case your problem is more political and about the concept of VAT in general. I mean almost any EU country had it for a long time. It sucks that there are huge differences when it comes to the exact amount but the concept itself is nothing new.
I think that only works if you have limited business, but I'm not sure. I believe the problem is that we're in a country with 25% VAT, but if we want to charge our German customer only 19%, we need to do that via a German company, otherwise we would have to charge them the 25%, leaving us uncompetitive (6% is more than our entire profit for some products).
If you mean VATMOSS then you don't have to be running a Limited Company - individual sellers as of January 2015 have to now account for the tax due in the country of the buyer. This apparently applies to sellers from outside the EU too, if you're selling certain classes of goods (non-personalised intangibles) over the internet to the EU then you're supposed to retain [3 pieces of!] evidence of the locality of the purchaser and deal with that country's tax office to pay the required tax.
The "MOSS" [Mini One-Stop Shop] bit is a system that individual countries in the EU use to send the payments to the countries where the tax is due.
The method you mention works for tangibles or personalised goods. With VATMOSS there is no exemption for SMEs or low-revenue situations or anything.
If you think you'll scale the business then it's best to start with a single company registered in a EU country of your choice. Generally, easiest to pick the one you will find easier to deal with, or you think you'll have the most sales in.
The local tax regulations will specify when you have to pay taxes in other EU jurisdictions. There are limited exceptions when you're just getting started. This only means registering for taxes - it's similar to the idea of US company registering to pay local state taxes.
Employing people is different and will require registering for employment taxes in each country.
Any competent business accountancy firm should be able to provide assistance: generally best to work with one which has relationships or offices in the other EU countries you're interested in operating in. If you can't afford that then your local government business department will be more than happy to help (as you are generating tax!): in the UK that's the Department for Business Innovation & Skills [1].
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-b...
The only fact that the there are some 20 different languages makes the EU a much less omogeneous market than the US.
This withouth considering that each country has its own employment policies, social security services, healthcare system, education system, revenue service...
I'm strongly pro-union, but it's far from perfect, or even efficient, in the current state.
No, I don't think "in some ways Europe is a more homogenous market" is far-reaching at all, especially when accompanied by a concrete example.
Source: People pay me to do that stuff.