01 · Framing
Decide what you are optimising for
Entering Europe is not one project. It is three, and people fail by trying to do them simultaneously.
- Proving demand. Does anybody in this market want this product at this price? Cheap to test, fast to answer.
- Building the operation. Stock in the right place, delivery fast enough, orders confirmed, cash coming back. Expensive to set up, cheap to repeat.
- Satisfying the rules. Customs, VAT, product compliance. Slow, boring, and disproportionately damaging when ignored.
The correct order is demand, then operation, then scaling the rules alongside. People who start with the rules spend three months on paperwork for a product nobody wants. People who ignore them entirely get stopped later at a worse moment.
Prove somebody wants it before you build anything that assumes they do.
02 · Where
Choosing the first country
Four criteria, in this priority order.
1. Can you get paid without a payment processor? In cash on delivery markets you can. That removes merchant account approval, chargebacks and most of the reason people never start. Romania, Bulgaria and Greece all qualify comfortably.
2. Can you reach the buyer in a day or two? This means stock in or near the country. A market you can only serve in three weeks is not a market you can serve.
3. Is the traffic affordable? Eastern European ad auctions are still meaningfully cheaper than Western European ones. You are not looking for the biggest audience, you are looking for one you can afford to reach repeatedly.
4. Is it growing? Eastern Europe grew ecommerce roughly 18% in 2024 against 6% in the West. Growing markets forgive mistakes that saturated ones punish.
Applied honestly, that usually lands on Romania: the highest COD share in the EU, 24 hour delivery from a domestic warehouse, and reasonable traffic costs. Bulgaria and Greece are the natural follow-ons, and they can be served from the same stock.
03 · Logistics
Getting stock into the EU
Since 1 July 2026 this decision carries a cost consequence it did not have before. The €150 customs duty exemption is being phased out, and a flat charge now applies per item type.
What that means in practice:
- Per-parcel from outside the EU: every order is its own customs line item and takes the charge. At 500 orders a month that is roughly €1,500, and more again in countries that add their own per-parcel handling fee.
- Bulk into an EU warehouse: you pay per product per shipment. Five products, one restock a month, is five line items a month rather than five hundred.
So the sequence is: test per-parcel because it is cheap and requires no commitment, then import in bulk the moment a product proves itself. The customs page runs the arithmetic on your own volume.
If you do not have a supplier or do not want to manage the import, the sourcing desk quotes the factory price, freight and duties as one delivered number into the warehouse.
04 · Rules
Compliance, in order of urgency
Not legal advice. This is the order in which these things typically start to matter, so you can plan rather than react.
Customs handling on your imports
Immediate, from your first shipment. If you import DDP through a partner this is handled for you as part of the landed cost; if not, you need a broker.
Product compliance and GPSR
Applies as soon as you sell to EU consumers. Non-food consumer products need compliance documentation, and a seller outside the EU is expected to have an EU Authorised Representative. Marketplaces became directly liable for this in 2026, so platform enforcement is real.
VAT registration and reporting
Becomes pressing as volume grows and thresholds are crossed. The One Stop Shop scheme exists to make multi-country filing manageable. Get an accountant before you need one.
EPR and packaging obligations
Applies in several member states and is easy to overlook. Usually a registration and a fee rather than a redesign.
Consumer rights and returns policy
EU consumer law gives distance buyers withdrawal rights. Your returns process needs to exist as a real process, not an exception you handle ad hoc.
05 · Execution
The first ninety days
A realistic sequence, assuming you have a product in mind and roughly €1,500 to €3,000 to work with.
- Weeks 1–2. Pick one country. Build one landing page in that language, one product, one form. Order a small stock batch, enough for two to three weeks of expected sales rather than a container.
- Weeks 3–4. Stock lands in the warehouse. Start ads small. Watch cost per lead, but do not judge anything on it yet.
- Weeks 5–8. Accumulate delivered orders. You are looking for 100 delivered on one product in one country, and the three numbers that come from them: confirmation rate, delivery rate, cost per delivered order.
- Weeks 9–12. Now decide. If the numbers work, double the budget or add a second country from the same stock. If they do not, change the creative or the product, not the country.
Ninety days sounds slow next to the promises made elsewhere. It is roughly how long it takes to get an answer you can actually trust.
06 · Growth
Expanding without repeating the setup cost
The reason to be careful about the first country is that the second one should be nearly free.
From a Romanian warehouse you can reach nine countries without moving a pallet: Romania itself and Bulgaria and Greece in 24 hours, then Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Slovenia in 48, plus Italy. Adding one of those to a working campaign costs you a translated landing page and an ad set. No new import, no new supplier, no new compliance work.
Four of those routes, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia and Slovenia, return free out of Romania, which makes them unusually cheap places to be wrong. A country that turns out not to work costs you the outbound leg only.
That is the whole expansion strategy: buy the operation once, then rent it across as many markets as your product suits. Rates and transit times for every route are on the courier page, and the hub itself is described on the Romania page.
FAQ
Questions people ask
In this order: prove demand cheaply in one country, then build the operation around whatever works, then scale compliance alongside it. Start in a cash on delivery market so you do not need a payment processor, and get stock inside the EU as soon as a product proves itself so delivery drops to a day or two.
Usually Romania. It has the EU’s highest cash on delivery share at an estimated 60% to 65% of orders, 24 hour domestic delivery is achievable from a local warehouse, ad costs remain reasonable, and it sits inside a region growing about three times faster than Western Europe.
Realistically €1,500 to €3,000 to start properly: a first stock batch plus roughly two weeks of ad spend before cash on delivery money begins arriving. Testing per-parcel without holding stock can be done for a few hundred euros, but that is market research rather than a business.
Customs handling on imports from your first shipment, GPSR product compliance including an EU Authorised Representative if you are based outside the EU, VAT registration as thresholds are crossed, EPR and packaging obligations in several member states, and a genuine returns process to meet EU consumer withdrawal rights.
About ninety days. Two weeks to set up and order stock, two weeks for it to land and ads to start, four weeks to accumulate roughly 100 delivered orders, then a decision. Faster answers than that are usually noise being read as signal.