In this episode, host Josh interviews Andy Hooper, CEO of Global Ecommerce Experts, about expanding US-based e-commerce brands into the UK and EU. Andy shares a three-pillar framework—compliance, logistics, and online distribution—for successful international growth. He emphasizes starting with the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands, and highlights the importance of market research, mentorship, and taking action. Andy also recommends key business books and productivity tools, and invites listeners to connect with him for guidance on global expansion. The episode offers actionable advice for brands considering international markets.

Chapters:

Introduction to Andy Hooper & Global Ecommerce Experts (00:00:00)
Josh introduces Andy Hooper, his background, and the mission of Global Ecommerce Experts.

The Overwhelm of International Expansion (00:01:12)
Josh discusses the complexities and challenges of expanding into European markets as a brand owner.

Guiding Brands Through Expansion: The Three-Part Framework (00:02:34)
Andy introduces a simplified three-step framework: compliance, logistics, and online distribution.

Deep Dive: Compliance, Logistics, and Online Distribution (00:03:13)
Andy breaks down compliance (business and product), logistics, and online distribution with practical examples.

Choosing the Right Countries for Expansion (00:07:04)
Josh and Andy discuss how to select the best initial countries for expansion, focusing on data-driven decisions.

Why UK, Germany, and the Netherlands? (00:07:35)
Andy explains why most brands start with the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands, and the strategic logistics advantages.

Actionable Takeaways for International Expansion (00:10:17)
Josh summarizes three key action items for listeners considering international expansion.

The Importance of Taking Action and Having a Mentor (00:12:38)
Andy emphasizes the need to take action and find a mentor or guide for successful expansion.

Andy’s Most Influential Business Books (00:13:47)
Andy shares his favorite business books, especially Russell Brunson’s series, and their impact on his approach.

Favorite Productivity Tool: Trello (00:16:38)
Andy discusses how Trello was instrumental in scaling his business and recommends it for project management.

How to Connect with Andy Hooper (00:17:59)
Andy shares how listeners can reach him on LinkedIn and learn more about his services.

Episode Wrap-Up (00:18:20)
Josh thanks Andy for his insights and closes the episode.

Links and Mentions:

Tools and Software
“Trello“: “00:16:38”

Books
“DotCom Secrets“: “00:15:08”
“Expert Secrets“: “00:15:08”
“Traffic Secrets“: “00:15:08”

Websites and Links
“LinkedIn Profile of Andy Hooper“: “00:18:13”

Key Concepts
“Three Essential Areas for Market Expansion”: “00:06:25”

Transcripts:

Josh 00:00:00  Today I am super excited to introduce you all to Andy Hooper. Andy is the CEO of Global eCommerce Experts, and has been successfully expanding e-commerce brands into new markets for over 15 years. He’s an accomplished specialist in e-commerce, and he works with companies around the world providing comprehensive gateways and solutions to new markets, especially US based organizations transitioning into Europe. Starting from the ground up, Andy has carved out a niche. Inspired by his own experience and success of growing an organization’s profits through e-commerce with an infectious energy for success, Andy leads a team of professionals in all aspects of e-commerce with fulfillment centers in the UK and EU. The global e-commerce team provides hassle free, end to end solutions that have helped thousands of sellers capitalize on the multi-billion dollar UK and EU markets when not working, Andy can often be found enjoying sailing, cycling and kayaking with his friends and family on England’s south coast. So with that introduction, Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy 00:01:09  Welcome, Josh. Thank you very much for having us. Much appreciated.

Josh 00:01:12  Yeah, I’m excited to have you, you know, dialing in across the pond, so to speak, and you have got a wealth of knowledge when it comes to global expansion. And we had a conversation prior to hitting the record button. And what you guys do is so uniquely different than I think many of the other agencies that help people kind of expand into Europe. And you’ve got a wealth of knowledge that I think our listeners are going to be anxious to hear. So, all right, Andy, I’m already as a brand owner, I’m already overwhelmed with the amount of complexities that you have to think through with all of this, right? Yeah. I mean, this is definitely in this conversation. I’m already understanding, like, this is not something I can go alone at. I have no idea what the French market needs, nor the the, you know, the Spain market or Germany. I might have been a tourist and had visited those countries, but creating a product, right, that actually meets the needs of those customers is a whole other animal in and of itself.

Josh 00:02:15  So my question here, Andy, is how do you kind of guide a brand through this process so that it is less overwhelming and cumbersome and as easy as a process as it potentially can be to capitalize on all of the e-commerce opportunity in the UK and the EU.

Andy 00:02:34  So we we’ve worked with over 2000 clients now, and that’s between our VAT, our warehousing, our account management, all the different pieces that we, we, we deal with. And having done that, what we’re able to do is identify what worked and what didn’t work and where we engage with the seller in the right way, the wrong way. You know, how did that help the brand grow, etc.. So what we were able to do was come up with a success pathway. What does an expansion pathway look like and what does it mean that you need to go through now? We came up with a seven step process that you need to go through. And of that seven step process, those are 3030 things you need to do.

Andy 00:03:13  But I’m going to break it down into three to make it a little bit quicker and easier for people to understand, because it doesn’t matter whether you’re expanding to the UK and Europe or whether you’re expanding to Canada or India or Australia or Japan or UAE. Actually, if you can solve these three things, it’s about working with partners that can help you to do these three things and making it as easy as possible. So the three things are compliance. You split compliance into two areas business compliance and product compliance. So business compliance to put it to put it in a nice way. Look, if you’re selling products in a country, the government wants to thank you for you selling the product in that country. That’s called tax. So the bottom line is you’re going to need to pay some tax when you’re wherever you’re selling your products from. That’s the bottom line. You need to go over someone who understands the tax in that region and can solve that for you. The second part is your product compliance. Product compliance comes under three pieces.

Andy 00:04:10  First of all, understand what regulations your product falls under in that region. Secondly, make sure the product meets those regulations in that region. And thirdly, make sure the labeling on the product is compliant with the regulations in that region. And there are two things you need to consider. Now, off the back of it, there’s another 25 things you could look at, but they’re the real basics that you need to master in any expansion. So that’s compliance. The second one is logistics. You need to work out how are you going to get your stuff from the factory into a warehouse that could be direct to Amazon’s warehouse, or to a three plant in the region, and distribute it to your customers? That could be B2B to FBA, Or it could be direct to consumer because you’re fulfilling from different marketplaces. Obviously in there you need to think about returns, reworks, customs, a host of other things. But you need to make sure that you’re working with a logistics product that can solve those bits for you in that region and understands how it works in that region.

Andy 00:05:13  So let’s take organic, for example. You know, if you’ve got organic plastered all over your product. One, is it compliant with organic regulations in the region? We’ve already sort of touched on, is that warehouse organic? Is that you. Can you ship it with an organic producer? Can you what does the customs look like? So lots of things you have to consider. And then the third piece is the online distribution. Where are you going to sell it. Which channels which will give you the biggest bang for buck, biggest return on investment and which ones strategically are right for you in which country? So, you know, realistically, let’s take let’s say you’re already selling on Amazon in the US. Well, to sell on Amazon in Europe would be a relatively straightforward and simple thing to do. If you’re selling on Amazon in the in the US, but you decide you want to sell on eBay in Europe, it’s a pretty thankless task because you don’t already understand it. So you’ve got to take the quick, easy wins.

Andy 00:06:06  Okay, well, I do that, so I’ll do that there and then make sure that I’m working with someone that understands my supplements so much better in France on CD discount than they do on Baucom in the Netherlands. And it’s those sort of intricacies. You then need to make sure you’re working with people to get you to the 80%.

Josh 00:06:25  Yeah, man, there is a lot that goes into that. But I love that three part framework that you kind of, you know, really boiled it down to, like, here are the three essential things that you need to consider going into any market, not just the UK or the EU. And I think that gives, I think, some great guidelines and Guideposts for our listeners to think about what needs to happen here. I think one of the most important things that I want to highlight from what you said there, Andy, is, you know, which specific country should we start with instead of just looking at the over bigger task of, you know, hey, I need to do EU expansion.

Josh 00:07:04  That’s overwhelming. If you can narrow it down and say, like, actually the best country for my product and it is going to be Germany. And here’s why. You know, obviously looking at keyword search volume and what products are currently on Amazon is that’s something that you help guide your brand through, is kind of doing those keyword research analyses to be like, yeah, let’s not go to Spain because nobody’s searching this search term in Spain. But tons of people are in Germany, for example.

Andy 00:07:35  Yeah. So we have, we’ve got a team of growth managers and account managers that support our clients of all of those different things. But, you know, coming back to what we’ve already said, you depend on, on that product is going to vary. But what I see is the most typical that our clients typically do is they expand into three markets first, and that’s the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. I’ll come to the Netherlands in a moment. Why that’s important, but the UK and Germany between them account for two thirds of all sales on Amazon in Europe.

Andy 00:08:06  So if you’re an Amazon seller, it makes perfect sense to open up in the UK and Germany. They’re the most active e-commerce markets as a rule. So it’s not just Amazon Focus that could be, you know, your Shopify site or whatever else you’re working on, so that those two are key because it gives you access instantly to one the UK market. You’ll understand that because you speak you if you’re coming from the US, you’ll understand your English. You’ll be able to work with that. No problems. Germany is a is a step two is step to the right with a foreign language. If you haven’t already done Spanish in the US. So you can then look at okay, Germany’s next biggest market. Let’s do that next. Now the reason I say the Netherlands is because it’s a strategic location from a logistics point of view. Everyone, and I mean everyone, ships all of their products into the Netherlands and distributes from there. So what happens is by shipping into the Netherlands, you can have a warehouse facility or three facility in the Netherlands and distribute from there.

Andy 00:09:06  What it does, it does two things. If you are an Amazon seller, you can you can ship across the border into Germany and you’re thinking or some people will be thinking, why don’t I just ship to Germany? Well, just Google shipping, e-commerce shipping to Germany and just look at the forums. I don’t need to say any more about that. So what you need to do is focus on how you can make that happen easily. So you ship into the Netherlands, you distribute it into FBA, if that’s what you’re doing into into Germany, and then you can distribute direct to consumer from the Netherlands to every other country across Europe, simply and easily. Now, if you want a next day delivery across the whole of Europe, you’ll need a slightly different service, but when you’re expanding initially and you need proof of concept to make sure it’s going to work, you don’t need next day delivery across the whole of Europe. You need to be able to get the products in the hands of customers in a in a 2 to 3 day time frame across the whole of Europe is more than good enough.

Andy 00:10:01  You know, that’s the way to deal with it. So so that that’s that answer is, you know, when typically when people expand UK, Germany and the Netherlands, UK and Germany accounts for two thirds of all sales and the Netherlands is a strategic location to, do your logistics from.

Josh 00:10:17  I love that. Now, as we wrap things up here, Andi, I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are the three action items that I noted. Andy. Let me know if you think I’m missing something. Step number one is if you have not crossed $5 million in US based sales, I would probably continue to double down on your efforts in the US market. And and in kind of relation to that, I would say make sure you’re building an actual brand amongst those sales. So don’t just say, hey, I’ve got three brands and in total we do $10 million, but each of them are at about $3 million each, because you’re going to need to come to the international market with an actual brand.

Josh 00:11:05  And so that would be action. Item number one is like keep the hustle and grind going with a brand in the US market until you cross that $5 million mark. I think that’s a great guideline. Step number two is there are a lot of different there’s a lot of noise out there in terms of international expansion. Here’s the biggest action item. Find a mentor and a guide that can provide the expertise that you need to make that international expansion happen. We talked a lot about a lot of different topics and a lot of watch outs, product Compliance, business compliance. All of those things need to be taken into consideration. Find a guide that has been there done that. So that’s action item number two. And then action item number three is what you said earlier Andy is like you just got to do it like there. So instead of, you know, getting caught up in analysis per paralysis by analysis vice versa, instead of just getting caught up like there’s so much I need to consider, I need to make sure I have all my ducks in a row.

Josh 00:12:12  That’s why you lean on that mentor and just take your step forward. Take one step forward. You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but you will never know if a huge opportunity is on the other side of that door. If you don’t, at least knock and put your foot forward. So those are my simple action items and strategies that people should be taking away from today’s episode. Andy, do you think I’m missing anything or would you add anything to those notes?

Andy 00:12:38  No, I mean, I think the biggest one for any business owner is to take action and make stuff happen. You know, I’m a big believer that, you know, you you sit and dwell on stuff. And actually if you sit and dwell on it in a year’s time, you’ll be like, I should have done that. My competitors now have done it. You’ve got to take the action in order to make it. You know, if you want to scale a brand or scale a scale of business, it doesn’t.

Andy 00:12:59  You know, you have to take action. You have to be prepared to go through those that that action to make things happen. You know, I totally agree that you need you a mentor, coach, whatever you want to call it within your business in various forms, use. Some of those things are very popular. You. But you need someone that’s done it. You know, we we’re we’re in a position to be able to support people with that. We are your guide, hence the success pathway. You know, what does that look like? Here’s the framework. And for those that want to expand, you can take the three things away that, you know compliance, logistics and online distribution. There are three things you’ve got to double down on. Think on about if I’m going to expand, whether it be to Mexico, Canada, Australia, Europe doesn’t matter. There are three things you’ve got to know, and you’ve got to understand those before you do it. And you can just make some notes.

Josh 00:13:47  I love it. Well said. All right, Andy, I’d love to ask each guest the following three questions at the end of each episode. So let’s start with number one. What has been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Andy 00:13:59  So I’ve read hundreds of books either. Well, when I say read, I’ve listened to hundreds of books. I’m not very good at reading actual books, but I spend a lot of time listening to books in the gym, on bike rides, whatever, on the car, wherever else. And I think that whilst there’s lots of different books, there are different types of books out there that work for different people. And I think that the number one thing that people should consider when they’re growing a business, you can have all the best websites, you can have all the best staff members. You can have the start doing now. You can have all the rest of it. But the number one thing that I think that people need is sales and marketing. How do you understand who your customer is? How do you know where they are and how do you get them in order to grow your business? So I remember when I first started out a business, I was going through different learnings and everything else and the and the series of books that stuck with me whilst we don’t do this in house is so Russell Brunson, Clickfunnels, there’s our there’s sort of three books that he’s got Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, and and Traffic Secrets.

Andy 00:15:08  Now, whilst I don’t necessarily have Clickfunnels, it’s not part of what we use for our business. You know, actually the methodology, the process, the simple pieces of know your customer is know where they are, know where to go and find them and to pull stuff together is exactly right. And there’s probably the books that I’ve read 3 or 4 times at different points, not necessarily from a funnel generation point of view, but from a marketing and sales point of view to understand, okay, how do people look for stuff? How do. Where do people go? You know, not how to sell. You know, sell to one person. Okay, I’m trying to buy my stuff. But more from a marketing lead point of view, you know, and I think that you’ve got to have different opinions and everyone’s going to have a different opinion whether that’s going to work for them or not. You, you, the self-development stuff is always going to be important, you know, how do you, you know, get up in the morning, join a 5 a.m. club and smash out a day.

Andy 00:16:04  You know, always going to be important. But for me, having someone that you can listen to that resonates both in the book, podcasts or whatever else. For me, that was important, that that ability to talk about marketing, how you’re thinking about the customer at all times.

Josh 00:16:17  Yeah, I love that. Those books I would highly recommend as well, even if you know it, taking the principles away from them, even if you’re not selling on Clickfunnels specifically. All right. Exactly. Let’s go to question number two. What is your favorite productivity or software tool that you’ve recently been using that you feel like has been a game changer?

Andy 00:16:38  So I think the number one tool we used as we were scaling was Trello. Trello was a really easy place to put business plans, strategies. list for clients a whole load of different things. Really easy and simple. We use this really, really well. and yeah, for me, Trello was probably the game changing piece of software that, to be fair, we use very little now because we have CRM software.

Andy 00:17:07  you know, more software than we probably really need or want, but it’s all integrated with that type of stuff. But Trello, for me, was the number one hack that helped me to scale the business that I used. It was three that we still use broadly today. That for anyone listening, thinking, well, I don’t really want to pay for a CRM or I don’t really want to pay for doing some project management software or I don’t want to, you know, actually, Trello does all of that. really, really well, really simply. And it’s easy to use. And I think that’s the important thing. It’s easy to use for people. So that’s my number one software that we use to help us scale and grow. And for me, the listeners here are wanting to scale and grow, hence why I use that one.

Josh 00:17:46  I like it, that is a great tool and recommendation. I’ve used that as well. All right. Our third and final question here, Andy, is Andy, as we conclude here, where can people go to learn more about you, follow your journey.

Josh 00:17:59  And then secondly, if people want to utilize your services, if they need that guide or that mentor or that expert to help them guide to help guide them in this EU, UK expansion, how could they reach out to you and find you?

Andy 00:18:13  Nice. So the best way to get hold of me is LinkedIn. Just go to Andy Hooper into LinkedIn, and I’m pretty certain I’m going to come up in one form or another.

Josh 00:18:20  Awesome. Andy, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us today.

Andy 00:18:25  Josh, thank you very much for having us. Thanks for listening and hopefully we’ll help people expand in the near future.