Cross-border business by country and language

Where are online marketplace sellers based, compared with the marketplace they sell on?

Mostly outside it: 47,476 of the 67,990 sellers found (69.8%) are based outside the country of the marketplace they sell on. The share runs from 84.3% on the Spanish marketplace to 29.3% on the UK one, and 36,323 sellers (53.4%) are based in mainland China or Hong Kong.

The four EU marketplaces are the most international in this dataset. On the German, Spanish, Italian and French marketplaces, between 75.4% and 84.3% of the sellers found are based in another country, against 36.0% on the US marketplace and 29.3% on the UK one. Mainland China and Hong Kong account for most of that gap: they are the base of 62.0% of the sellers found on the German marketplace and 68.0% on the Spanish one. Sellers based in another EU country are a smaller group, from 9.0% of the sellers found on the German marketplace to 20.1% on the French one. A seller's country here is the business address on its seller profile, and a business that sells on two marketplaces is counted on each, so these are sellers found per marketplace, not unique businesses. Read that way, on every one of the four EU marketplaces most sellers found are not based in the marketplace's own country.

Eurostat's e-commerce statistics for individuals describe the buyers' side of online shopping in the EU each year; this study looks at the sellers.

How many countries do the sellers come from?

81 countries and territories, 45 of them with 10 or more sellers found. Mainland China has the most, 34,985 of the 67,990 sellers found (51.5%), followed by the United States with 7,018 and Germany with 6,593.

The seller base is concentrated at the top but wide below it. Mainland China accounts for 34,985 of the 67,990 sellers found (51.5%), and the top five countries, mainland China, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy, for 56,694 (83.4%). Below them the list runs long: 45 countries and territories have 10 or more sellers found, and the other 36 have fewer than 10 each. Nine of the top 15 are EU countries, from Germany with 6,593 sellers found to Cyprus with 254, and together they account for 16,835 (24.8%). Each marketplace is counted on its own, so a business on several marketplaces counts once on each, and the totals are sellers found, not companies. For a practice whose clients come from cross-border trade, the point is the range: a client base drawn from sellers like these would span dozens of countries and many languages, with a long tail of countries that each bring only a few clients.

A compliance client base shows the same kind of spread on a smaller scale. The first business on EU27 holds registrations and appointments for its clients in 24 countries, as set out in How many countries does a compliance client need?

What language are the sellers' own websites in?

Often not the marketplace's. On the German, Spanish, French and Italian marketplaces, 6,358 of the 13,886 sellers with their own website (45.8%) have it recorded in another language, and 4,566 (32.9%) in English. On the UK and US marketplaces, the figures are 5.4% and 1.8%.

English is the main other language. Of the 6,358 own-website sellers on the four EU marketplaces whose website is not in the marketplace's language, 4,566 (71.8%) have it recorded in English. The share in another language varies by marketplace, from 34.3% of own-website sellers on the German marketplace to 60.4% on the French one. On the UK and US marketplaces, where the marketplace's language is English, only 5.4% and 1.8% have a website recorded in another language. The data does not link website language to seller country, so it cannot say how many of these websites belong to sellers based abroad. Language is detected automatically, one per site, so a site offering several languages is recorded under one of them, and some sites recorded in English may also have German, Spanish, French or Italian pages. Even read cautiously, the figures show that the language a seller sells in and the language of its own website often differ: for 45.8% of own-website sellers on these four marketplaces.

Which languages do compliance clients use, first-hand?

Mostly English, with about one in five people using another language. At the first business on EU27, 84 of 388 people who requested a quote between 4 June and 10 October 2026 (21.6%) used a page not in English, German the largest with 38. Of its 61 paying clients, 10 (16.4%) did, 8 of them in German.

These are page languages, not first languages. English is the default page language, so the 304 people who used only English pages may include people who read another language better, and the business offered its pages in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Chinese, though not every service in every language. Even so, 84 of the 388 people (21.6%) used a page in another language, spread across five languages, and the 61 paying clients include 8 who used German pages and 2 who used French. Eleven people (2.8%) used pages in two languages across their quote requests, English and German for 6 of them, and 2 of the 61 paying clients (3.3%) bought through pages in two languages. In plain terms, they switched language between one request and the next. For an onboarding flow, that is the finding to keep: a client chooses a language at the start, but may change it later, and the record has to follow.

What does this mean for a client portal and onboarding flow?

This part is interpretation, not data. A client base drawn from cross-border trade will write in several languages: 69.8% of 67,990 sellers found are based outside the marketplace's country, and 16.4% of 61 paying compliance clients used a page not in English. So a portal should ask each client's language first, translate both ways and keep the original beneath.

Language first means the question comes before anything else. In EU27, a new client's first screen asks one thing, their language, English, Deutsch or Français, and the whole portal follows. The client can change it later from the menu, which matters for the 11 people and 2 clients here who used two languages. Translation both ways means each side writes in its own language: messages between a client and a practice are translated in both directions. Keeping the original beneath every translated message means anyone can check what was said. The EU's own institutions work on a similar principle: EU nationals may write to them in any official EU language, and the institutions must reply in the same language, as the EU's page on languages sets out. Almost nobody searches for this by name: "multilingual client portal" and "client portal with translation" each draw 0 average monthly Google searches across eight English-speaking markets.

Those search figures are in What people search for in client portal and onboarding software. How a new client starts in EU27 is on the VAT and tax page, and how translation works is on the features page. EU27 costs £4,950–£9,950 to set up, then £595 a month; the pricing page has the detail.

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