We sell lots in the UK (services and goods), and handle UK VAT, obviously.
Some of you may be surprised that A&A sell all over the world as well - development circuit boards. I have mentioned it, I am sure.
For now, we have used Amazon and Tindie.
Both are a problem...
Amazon
Two good aspects of Amazon, one is they will do fulfilment, so we send stock and they ship to customers. and secondly they handle selling to EU, etc, and the VAT and so on. We do not have to worry about it, and for these exports we are paid the VAT exclusive price.
Amazon have been arseholes, they unlisted the most popular product on a mere accusation, took months to sort with frozen stock, and finally returned after I threatened to sue. We lost all the reputation and reviews, and new listing of same item is selling 20% of the rate.
We now only list this one popular(ish) product on Amazon, as they do sell some, and sell to EU easily. But they did screw us over for no reason.
Tindie
Tindie are useless at tax and VAT. We have to do the shipping. However, we have integrated their API such that staff can see a list of orders, click and get postage via Royal Mail (with all the customs declaration stuff). They put in a jiffy bag, stick on label, and postman collects with the rest of the days postage.
Tindie were selling pretty well, close to Amazon rates, and sometimes more. But we had to ship. The much more slick postage integration I recently did makes it a lot easier and my staff can take over many of the products we sell without any hassle.
Tindie then shut down with no warning for maintenance, lied about it for two weeks, finally said new owners, made site live but with the one important feature of "paying us" (or anyone else) missing. We shipped some more orders, but have now zeroed all stock until sorted. They claim to have sent balance, but we will not know for sure for a day or two.
Lectronz
So we have signed up with Lectronz. They are tiny compared to Tindie, but that seems to be changing (I wonder why!).
They work the same as Tindie, free to list, charge a fee for sales, and card processing charges too (stripe). They even have Tindie API integration to import products (they then need a little work, and Tindie may be blocking some of it).
But they have a lot of extra bits...
Better shipping rates
The shipping is saner, it is all linked to sets of countries, but is all weight based. You set the shipping for a weight range, and you can also set a tariff rate for US as a percentage! This is lacking in Tindie.
They don't have a shipping rate that is price + price per kg (I have asked) as that would be even better as that is how we pay Royal Mail for international shipping.
Tariffs for US
But this means sales to US show (and charge) a specific tariff fee - very clear, and we link in to doing PDDP shipping with Royal Mail.
VAT for UK
We can, and have, told them we are VAT registered and selling to UK has 20% VAT. They shows this and add it at point of sale. Simple.
VAT for EU
This is where it gets fun. For orders shipped to EU, under (I think) €150, they will automatically work out the EU VAT based on target country, and add to the price.
They deduct this from what they pay us, and settle with EU VAT authorities for us.
They then tell us an IOSS code to use with Royal Mail to record as a pre-paid VAT. The customer then has no hassle with paying VAT on import.
This is really hassle free for us and the customer.
Other countries still have VAT on import and so is any order to EU over €150, but they managed to make that all very clear on the checkout page.
Do buy some stuff, here. I will be adding more and more soon.
I’ve always found it slightly baffling how discussions about market dominance tiptoe around what seems, on the surface, an obvious solution: if a company like Amazon is so problematic, why not simply build a better alternative? The barriers to entry, at least in their most visible form, appear almost trivial - websites are no longer the arcane constructs they once were, and the tooling available today enables a reasonably competent developer to stand up a functional e-commerce platform in a matter of days. From that vantage point, the persistence of a single dominant player begins to look less like inevitability and more like a collective failure of imagination.
ReplyDeleteThe same logic applies to social platforms. It’s often portrayed as an extraordinary gamble to spend billions acquiring an existing network, yet one might reasonably ask why replicating such a service isn’t considered the more rational route. After all, the core mechanics - posting content, following users, basic interaction layers - are conceptually straightforward. If anything, the real puzzle is why more technically capable individuals don’t simply recreate these systems at a fraction of the cost, iterate rapidly, and allow merit to dictate adoption. Perhaps the true complexity is overstated, or perhaps we’ve grown too accustomed to assuming that scale itself is an insurmountable moat. ~Herbert.
I agree with you broadly - discovery is the biggest issue. Amazon is a muscle reflex for many people, whereas little-ecommerce-website.com isn't. Social platforms on the other hand need an audience - how do you get critical mass on my-new-social.com? And once you do get critical mass, the scaling issues ARE technically challenging (I have been there and done that). Not to discourage trying, just don't underestimate the challenges. Patrick
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