Selling Wholesale Across EU Borders: Currencies, Languages, Price Lists and VAT
A wholesaler in Stuttgart sends a price list to a new buyer in Vienna, then a second one to a contractor in Lyon, and within a week realises the Austrian customer is seeing French freight terms and the Frenchman is being quoted in the wrong currency. Nobody did anything wrong on purpose. It is just what happens when you try to run cross-border B2B sales out of a spreadsheet and a generic webshop built for a single market. Selling wholesale across EU borders is mostly a matter of keeping many small things straight at once: the language a buyer reads, the currency they pay in, the price they are entitled to, and the tax that applies to their situation. Get the plumbing right and exports become a normal part of the week. Get it wrong and you spend Friday afternoons issuing corrected invoices.
One catalogue, several markets that don't collide
The first instinct when going abroad is to duplicate the shop: a German store, an Austrian store, a French store. Three logins, three product databases, three places where stock can drift out of sync. Then a pallet sells in one channel and the other two keep offering it as available. The cleaner model is one catalogue with market-specific layers on top. Selldi runs B2B and B2C on a single backend, which means the same product, the same stock figure and the same order flow can be presented differently per market without being copied three times. A buyer in one country reads their own language, a buyer in the DACH region sees German, and an export customer sees English, all drawing from the same underlying inventory. When forty units leave the warehouse, every market sees thirty-nine.
Currencies and per-market price lists
A German wholesaler quoting a Czech distributor in euros is fine until the distributor asks for koruna, and now you are maintaining a parallel pricing structure in your head. Export selling needs separate price lists per market, in the local currency, decoupled from your home prices. On top of that sits ordinary B2B reality: this customer has a contract rate, that group gets a volume discount, this one buyer negotiated something specific years ago and still expects it. Selldi handles individual price lists, group discounts and per-customer or per-group pricing, so a French buyer logs in and sees their net price in euros while a Swiss buyer sees a different list entirely. The point is not clever pricing logic. The point is that the buyer never has to email and ask whether this is the right price for them, because the right price is the only one they can see.
VAT is where exports get genuinely fiddly
This is the part people underestimate. Selling goods from Germany to a business in another EU country is normally an intra-Community supply: you invoice without VAT, but only if the buyer has given you a valid VAT identification number and you can show the goods actually crossed the border. No valid number, no exemption, and you may end up owing the tax yourself. Reverse charge shifts the obligation to the buyer in their own country, which is convenient until someone enters a VAT number with a typo and the whole invoice is wrong. Selling to a private consumer in another EU state is different again, with distance-selling thresholds and the One-Stop-Shop scheme in play. None of this is a software feature you buy; it is a set of rules your accountant owns. What the platform should do is feed clean, structured order data into wherever those rules are enforced. Selldi integrates with your ERP or accounting system through an API and syncs orders, stock and prices both ways every 15 to 60 minutes, so the figures live in one place instead of being re-keyed by hand on every export order.
The small things that quietly cost you money
A few pitfalls show up again and again once orders start crossing borders. Customers paste an order from a spreadsheet or a PDF in their own language and someone has to retype it, slipping in a wrong line every dozen orders. Selldi's AI reads orders from email, PDF or Excel and writes them into your ERP, which removes the retyping step behind most cross-border order errors. Warehouse staff picking an export pallet need to confirm they have the right GTIN, not the domestic equivalent that looks identical on the shelf; the EAN/GTIN scanner runs in a phone browser, with no app to install on every warehouse device. And payment expectations differ by market, so card payments alongside local methods matter more abroad than at home. None of this is glamorous. It is simply the difference between an export order that closes itself and one that generates three follow-up emails.
When this is not worth it
Cross-border B2B infrastructure earns its keep when exports are repeatable. If you ship to the same fifteen distributors in three countries every month, a platform that keeps their language, currency, prices and VAT status straight pays for itself fast. If you have made two opportunistic export sales this year and have no pipeline behind them, you do not need multi-currency price lists; you need a careful invoice and a chat with your accountant. The same goes for a single-market wholesaler whose growth is at home, not abroad. Building out separate markets, currencies and tax handling for traffic that isn't there is effort spent on a problem you don't have yet. Selldi's implementation takes roughly two weeks, with an implementation fee plus a subscription and no commission on sales, so the cost is predictable, but it is still a cost. Spend it when the export volume is real.
If you do sell across borders regularly, the honest test is whether your current setup ever makes a customer see the wrong price, the wrong currency, or a VAT line that has to be corrected later. If the answer is yes more than rarely, that is the leak worth fixing. You can click through how the multi-market, multi-currency side looks at demo.selldi.pl/showcase, or write to helpdesk@selldi.pl and describe which countries you ship to.