Creating your product> outside USA?

[yeikow]

Hi all!

I finished the book last weekend and I'm re-reading it to complete all the exercises. I ran into a bump> all the info provided regarding dropshipping, reselling and licesing your products... what if you live outside the USA?

I noticed most are american companies and you need to have a company yourself to do business with them. Does living in Europe mean you can't quite make use of that information? I also think that the USA market is a lot bigger than if I stick to my little european country. That would be a pitty.

Thoughts?

[Gerto]

Where are you from? I'm from Belgium myself, and a lot of times that doesn't make it easier to apply something like T4HWW (just getting the book was hard already, you can't just walk into a bookstore in Belgium if you want the book :) )

To answer your question, I'm still reading the book, so haven't actively researched things like this yet, but there are certainly companies like that in Europe as well.

I don't think you should worry too much about the size of the market (depends on what you want to sell though), it has its advantages! If you want to target a big part of Europe (or just one country with more than 8 million inhabitants for example), the market should be big enough to get started, and ... there's probably much less competition than in the U.S.!

Good luck!

[crowsnatcher]

I know what you mean. I just read the book and I want to get started right away, but I live in Taiwan. I certainly have no intention of targeting a Taiwanese market. I can't even read Chinese.

On the other hand, I'm sure there is a way around this. Consider that most of the business transactions will be done over the internet. Tim Ferris himself seems to be abroad most of the time. Say for example your target market is in the US and you find a drop-ship supplier also located in the US; it shouldn't matter where you've posted your website from. Financial transactions threaten to be the tricky part, but I haven't done any research yet. This is just off the top of my head but I'm sure there's a way.

I'll keep posting as I go and I hope you guys do the same. Let's figure this shit out and quit our jobs.

[MiniBlueDragon]

Around 6 months ago I found a lovely "niche" for the UK and decided to move into it. I registered a Ltd Company, designed a website, bought my hosting and set-up my own shopping cart system.

I then contacted suppliers in the US to find UK wholesalers and was told that there was only one place for the product I wanted. I spoke to them and was told that because I'm not an existing company (i.e. too new!) they wouldn't allow me to do business with them and I couldn't even use them as a dropshipping service in the UK.

After much research I also found that in the UK there are too few drop-shipping companies to be able to make a profit from re-selling so my new focus is on my own products.

In my opinion the US has a HUGE headstart over Europe but if we/I can get-in at the beginning of the migration over here there's a lot of potential!

[crowsnatcher]

I've been doing some reading on-line. There's a drop-ship guru named Armand Melanson with a few good things to say (although, I don't recommend you buy his ebook). He also happens to be Canadian. According to him a business license from your own country is enough to do business with any supplier in the U.S. He recommends sourcing from a US supplier direct to a U.S. market when getting started. That is only for drop shipping, but I think info products would be even easier. I'm currently developing an e-book and CD based course, but I want to play around with some drop shipping schemes just to get my feet wet and learn a few things. Hell, if I lose a few hundred bucks in the process, that's a lot cheaper than business school.

[yeikow]

Thanks guys, nice insights.

I feel like I'm in a phase where I have to further educate myself in the worlds of dropshipping and reselling. I am aware of paarlisis by analysis but being well informed can avoid losing precious dollars, as it has happened to me in the past. Minidragon's experience seems to point in that direction too, thanks for sharing.

The transaction part, as crowsnatcher suggested, seems to me like the major bump in the road when dealing with US dropshipers while being based in Spain (I currently live in the UK but I'm moving back to Spain in less than a month).

I haven't yet found particular advice on that, but I do recommend checking out the information suggested in the book about how the industry works that can be found in these free ebooks:

http://www.worldwidebrands.com/wwb/kh_freeebookHOME.asp

It's obviously biased towards the company they are promoting but it has what seem to me very logical and experienced points of views on how to succesfully set up our muse.

Time to conquer Europe! ;)

[crowsnatcher]

As far as I can tell, you need to get a business license from your local government and a merchant account from your local bank. You have to pay for a merchant account, but I believe they will even help you set up your credit card software on-line. This way you can take credit card orders from anywhere in the world and the money goes straight into your account. If you can't get a merchant account, you'll have to use Paypal. Taxes are a different story, but your local government should have info about that. A lot of this information is in the Worldwide Brands ebook, too.

[StefanAustria]

Hello, i am based in Austria - and had the same thoughts as you ... a very short while. As written before, you don't need a market in the size of the USA. Start with a market you are familiar with - and think about using additional selling vehicles in combination with PPC.

Austria has around 8 mio. people. The nice side is i can locate my potential customers more precisiously (pff, hard word, hope it didn't suck to much) - give it into very specialised magazines that don't cost that much, find a company with stores around the country with better rates, and so on.

The next thing: the EU has now a peoplebase with around 300 mio. - after finding a solution for translation and good call centers with multilingual support there is much place to grow into. :)

And to add a little local heroism ;)
BMW, VW, Audi, nearly the whole cosmetic industry, jewelery, KTM, Nestle ... european companys.