Ecommerce in the EU and US: A Founder’s Reality Check

A US shopper returns almost one in five things they buy online. The National Retail Federation expects American consumers to send back nearly $849.9 billion of merchandise in 2025, with online return rates running around 19.3% — well above the in-store rate. If your margin model assumes the sale is final, the US will quietly eat it.

The EU and US are the two markets every SME assumes it understands because it shops in them. That familiarity is the trap. Both are large, mature and profitable. They also carry frictions a founder won’t see until the money’s committed. Here’s the honest version of each.

Two mature markets, two different problems

The US is one market with one language, one currency and a returns culture that’s structurally expensive. The EU is the opposite: a single legal framework draped over 27 countries, 24 languages and wildly different buying habits. The US tests your unit economics. The EU tests your operations. You don’t beat both with the same plan.

The scale justifies the effort. US retail ecommerce hit $316.1 billion in Q4 2025 alone — 16.6% of all retail sales, up 5.3% year on year while total retail grew just 2.7% (U.S. Census Bureau). European B2C ecommerce turnover rose 7% to €842 billion across the continent (Ecommerce Europe, 2025 report). The demand is there. The question is what it costs you to capture it.

The US: Amazon’s gravity and the returns tax

In the US, Amazon is the weather. Estimates of its share of US retail ecommerce cluster around 37–41% (eMarketer’s figure is roughly 40%). For an SME that means a strategic fork on day one: sell on Amazon and accept its fees, competition and customer ownership, or build direct demand and pay to acquire every customer yourself. Most SMEs end up doing both, and the ones who plan for that split early waste less.

Then there’s the returns tax. A 19.3% online return rate isn’t a customer-service line item — it’s a core cost of doing business in the US. It changes your pricing, your packaging, your reverse logistics, and which products are even worth selling there. Build the return into the model from the first spreadsheet, not after the first peak season.

The EU: one market on paper, 27 in practice

Europe’s appeal is a genuinely huge connected consumer base — 78% of EU individuals aged 16 to 74 bought online in 2025 (Eurostat). Its difficulty is that “selling in the EU” is really selling in many countries at once, each with its own language, preferred payment methods, and delivery expectations. A storefront that converts in the Netherlands can flop in Italy for reasons that have nothing to do with the product.

The one thing the EU has genuinely simplified is tax. The reformed VAT One-Stop-Shop and Import One-Stop-Shop let you register once and account for VAT across the bloc — and they’re working at scale: over €33 billion in VAT collected through these systems in 2024, with more than 170,000 businesses registered (European Commission). That’s a real reduction in compliance drag, but it’s still a system you have to set up correctly before your first cross-border sale, not after.

Localisation is the work, not the polish

In both markets, the gap between “translated” and “localised” is where conversion is won or lost. Local payment methods, local-language support, local sizing and delivery promises, local-currency pricing — these aren’t finishing touches. They’re the difference between a market that converts and one that just gets traffic.

This is where a distributed team has a structural edge over a single head-office crew. A native German speaker handling the DACH storefront, a designer who knows Italian buying cues, a developer wiring up iDEAL or Klarna where each is expected — that’s a borderless setup doing what it’s built for. One central team trying to fake fluency in seven markets will lose to competitors who didn’t fake it.

How to sequence US versus EU entry

• If your edge is product and price, the US rewards you faster — one market, one language, huge volume. Just price the return rate in.
• If your edge is range and brand, the EU’s connected base pays off, but only after you’ve localised at least your two or three priority countries properly.
• Don’t launch all of Europe at once. Pick two countries, win them, reuse the operational template. The VAT system already lets you scale the others without re-registering.
• Decide your Amazon stance deliberately — on-platform, off-platform, or both — before you spend on either.
• Model reverse logistics in both, heavier for the US.

The honest trade-off

Maturity cuts both ways. These markets have money and infrastructure, but they also have entrenched incumbents, demanding consumers and compliance you can’t skip. The US will punish a weak margin through returns and ad costs. The EU will punish weak operations through fragmentation. Neither forgives a plan that treated them as one generic “Western” market.

And localising across borders has its own cost: more coordination, more handoffs, more people who each own a slice. Run that loosely and quality drifts. The advantage is real, but it has to be managed, not assumed.

Bottom line

Treat the US as a unit-economics test and the EU as an operations test, and resource each accordingly. Price the returns into America. Localise — properly — your priority European countries before chasing the rest. Decide your platform stance on purpose. Do that, and two crowded, mature markets become two of the most profitable an SME can serve.

If you want a straight read on which market to enter first and what it’ll actually cost to run, that’s what our free audit is for.

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About the author: Daniele Antoniani is the founder of The Sharing Lab, a borderless studio that gives SMEs access to world-class global talent without agency markups or office overhead. He spent 15 years building affiliate programs and e-commerce partnerships across Europe and North America before founding the Lab.