Congratulations and hat tip to you sir! You must have executed incredibly well.
I have to admit I'm a little bit jealous of an environment so conductive to starting a small business. I can see many hurdles in this small EU country to something like this succeeding. The burdens of administration and regulation and the fractured market would make this tricky to pull off. The high taxation also makes one question the wisdom of taking this kind of risk. That's not just a direct brake. All of this also creates a very different attitude, a culture less tuned to entrepreneurship.
What hurdles would those be? I'm sure that as long as you do your administration properly, selling electronics from your proverbial bedroom isn't a major issue.
This comments sounds more like generalised anti-EU sentiment than a reply to the article.
I'm very much pro EU, and I don't want to deviate from the OP's excellent original article too much, but here are few Belgium specific examples. Not too many of them hold for all EU member states, but those would still make for significant hurdles:
- You need to formally set up as a company. Where are you going to do so?
- Establishing the simplest allowable entity able to send invoices. Just establishing would cost ~115€, or ~134€. The article student author mentions $100 being a lot of money to them.- Provincial tax. Most Belgian provinces have a yearly tax on the existence of any company, no matter how small or inactive. My native province's rate for example is 140€. That's ~$163 at today's rate.
- Local tax. Many local governments tax business activity separately.
- Social security.
- Peppol electronic invoicing. If you buy or sell anything b2b, you're required to use the peppol electronic invoicing network. No self made pdf's allowed. Set up software. Pay for a subscription.- Banking. Better get a separate bank account for your business, or you give fiscal authorities the right to start looking into your private accounts.
- Fiscal uncanny valley. Combine any regular tech job with a sole proprietorship side gig. You pay ~53.5% in income taxes and ~21% in social security contributions on the net side income, keeping about 1/3 of your net taxable income.
- VAT and administration. Have you seriously tried to sell across intra-EU borders as a student and stay compliant?
- Earn over a relatively low token amount. If you're from a family with 3+ kids, your parents risk losing a 3k€+ net tax advantage. This can in some cases make for a significantly >100% taxation rate between parents and student children. What if your parents can't afford the tax increase?- Student status. Drop below 27 ECTS points of course load and you're not a student entrepreneur anymore. You're suddenly a full-time entrepreneur, with the full load of responsibilities. Example: 3.6k€/year in social security contributions, even on zero or negative income. Where are you going to get the money?
- Physical product.
Some of this just needn't apply, especially from a UK perspective; you can operate as a sole trader with very little paperwork until you make £85,000 and have to register for VAT. You don't need a company shell or a business bank account.
"Social security" equivalent: as a sole trader you do have to pay National Insurance above a minimum threshold.
(one of the massive differences between UK regulatory culture and the EU is that the UK is very good at having "de minimis" thresholds so you don't have to worry about compliance until you've actually made decent money. EU rules tend to apply as soon as you sell a single item, which is ridiculous)
> Electronics specific. CE compliance is expensive.
This on the other hand is a real problem. WEEE as well.
> shipping rates
It is insane that it is cheaper to ship from China than intra-EU.
Every country has hurdles. It's not like the US doesn't have weird worlds of tax exemptions, and 50 sets of state tax regulation to consider [or outsource to your fulfilment platform...] when shipping to consumers, and if I was a US business importing microelectronics from China, 21% import tax that doesn't change every couple of months would sound like a *dream...
Of course every country throws hurdles onto the student entrepreneur's path. Belgium, unlike the Baltics, the US (for now) or many others, just happens to be a world championship contender in this discipline.
most of the same obligations exist in the US, OP is probably just completely noncompliant