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Dear Dr. Ecommerce,

We are a company located in Slovakia, former Czechoslovakia and we are engaged in trade with household and decorative glass. We sell items such as vases, bottles, cups, dishes made of crystal glass, all hand-made and hand-cut.

Until now we have been acting mainly on the Slovak market, but we plan to build an online shop and to sell our products worldwide via Internet.

Our web site will enable our costumers to select goods and pay us online and we will send our product to our customers by post. Our customers are planned to be not the distributors nor importers, but end-users of crystal glass (average consumers).

We have a few questions and we would be very grateful if
you could give us any help in this matter.

1.Are there any regulations or restrictions for import and sale of above kind of glass products to the consumers in countries of European Union?

2.Is it possible to send our goods to our customers by post?

3.If we send to our costumers our goods by post, do they have to pay any additional fees (VAT, custom fees...) and if so, how many per cents?

4.Can you please give us any recommendations on companies which enable on-line payment and provides software for it?

We are looking forward to your answer soon and thank you in advance.

Yours sincerely,

RC

Dear RC:

It sounds like an interesting venture.

1. As far as I know, there are no restrictions on exporting your products to Europe.

2. You can send your products by post. Many companies use International courier services for shipping their products. You might offer courier deliver for people who want their products quickly.

3. Normally consumers have to pay customs duties and VAT at the point of entry. In your case, this would normally be at the post office or to the courier service which delivers the product. In fact, with smaller purchases for personal use, VAT and customs duties are often not collected.

4. If you do not already have a merchant account for collecting credit card payment on the Internet, this would be your first step. Check with your bank to see if they offer such a service. If not, they should be able to recommend a bank that does. Hopefully, the bank will also provide credit card processing software.

If you also want a complete e-commerce system, you'll have to search for various solutions. If you go to http://www.zdnet.com and enter "commerce" into the search engine, you'll find numerous product reviews and even some demo software you can download.

Good luck,

Dr. Ecommerce