Hi,

We are small but successful and profitable online retail company with
offices in the US.

Lately, we were thinking of expanding into Europe. We can do it now,
by shipping from States to EU, but we were more thinking of opening a warehouse in Europe, hiring people in europe signing
distributors over in Europe and doing it strictly within Europe (treat
US and EU businesses as separate).

I have a few questions if anyone could give me some direciton to how to start reseaching or what i need to do to start a business in Europe I would appreciate it.

1) What shipping company is widely used in Europe?

2) How would we (and do we need to?) register a company in Europe? Do
we need to incorporate it in one of the countries? I was told
Netherlands has one of the lowest taxes in EU.

3) Would it be hard to open a business account in Europe? What are the procedures?

4) What are top 3-4 merchants that accept credit cards online in
Europe. What currency should we accept? Euro? UK pounds?

5) What is preferred payment over the internet in Europe? Credit card, cheque?

5) Customer Service & Language issues - how would we go about this?
Should the site be in English or should we add French, German,
Spanish, etc.

6) Marketing – what we do in US – just get listed on Yahoo, and
pay Google and Overture. What should we do in Europe?

7) Also, I was thinking maybe at first of opening up a small just for
the UK (as it is English speaking and all) and then gradually
expanding into the rest of Europe. If we do it this way, should we
have different domains – i.e. .com for US, .co.uk for UK, .de for
Germany? Or can we use .co.uk for all of the Europe? Would users say
in France be turned away if a domain is with .co.uk?

Any other help you can provide us with doing business in Europe would
be really appreciated as it will help us to decide. Thanks a lot!!!