

Ask YC: Are Americans forgetting the rest of the world? - mixmax

I often encounter sites that basically assume you're living in America - many requiring you to have valid American credentials (state, zip, phonenumber, etc) to sign up. This is not only something that occurs on small sites, AOL is an example of one of the bigger sites doing it - (https://new.aol.com/freeaolweb/)<p>Why is this? It seems to me that American companies are missing a lot of business this way. Is there a reason for it, or are American companies just ignoring the rest of the world?
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jgrahamc
The US is itself a huge market with relatively uniformity (you mention the
address information as one example, the currency is another). I don't see
anything wrong with a US company deciding that US customers are reasonable
target. Yes, they are missing out on business, but they are also missing out
on hassles with deal with the RotW.

So my take is that for many US companies the answer is "Why bother? We have a
big market here".

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piers
<slightly off topic>

The thing that gets me is that there are a lot of US companies that expect
people to use credit cards. I'm guessing that this is because (AFAIK) most US
citizens have credit cards. However, over here in the UK (rest of Europe too?
I don't know) credit cards aren't so prolific. I wish people would start
allowing more international forms of payment, such as PayPal. I REALLY want to
start using the paid versions of some of 37 Signals stuff as well as some of
the Amazon Web Services, but I can't because they don't accept Paypal (or
something similar). The thing that gets me is that I can buy something online
via Amazon, but can't use their web services. </rant>

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tim2
Paypal is a terribly troublesome service.

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mixmax
Is there a good alternative? Anyone have any experiences ?

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noonespecial
There is still quite a bit of friction at the borders. As a company that ships
equipment both into and out of America, we still find it difficult/expensive
to get goods and money into and out of this country. Actually difficult to the
point that a profitable product in US is not profitable outside because the
profit margin is more than absorbed by the cost of getting the goods out of
the country and getting the payment back in.

Instead we've had to set up a rather convoluted system where our hardware is
sourced and assembled outside of the US. It was so much of a pain that I can
easily see why some people might just decide its not worth the hassle. The
economy may be global now, but if you're not in Asia or eastern Europe, your
country didn't get the memo.

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aggieben
Uh...AOL = _America_ OnLine.

Point taken, but AOL isn't a great example - it started when Americans really
were (practically speaking) the only netizens (and overseas connections were
expensive).

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pelle
It's a problem mainly of ignorance. Both with regards to requiring zip and
state and also with the whole liability problem.

The liability issue is only a problem for a few types of businesses, in
particularly financial.

You may offend or break laws (such as EU privacy laws), but it really doesn't
matter if you're a US company without offices in an EU jurisdiction as they
don't have jurisdiction over you, no matter what they say.

It is very easy to make a signup form internationally compliant. You just have
to do zip/postalcode, state/province/region. Also don't make any of the
address fields required unless you need them for shipping purposes.

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wheels
This seems pretty obvious to me (as a european resident). The amount of stuff
you have to figure out to reach the US market is a lot less than the amount of
stuff you have to figure out to reach the european market. That's a lot of the
impetus for tighter european economic integration. If the cost of reaching the
US market is a fraction of the cost of reaching the combined european market,
it doesn't matter if there are a few more people in the EU. You also can't
really measure online market size by GDP or pure head count. Some corners of
the EU (Bulgaria, for instance) are less developed than Mexico.

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swombat
Oversight and pragmatism. You have to start somewhere - and it's usually quite
sensible to start with the biggest market, and then expand to the smaller
ones.

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mixmax
Absolutely.

But a company the size of AOL surely can't make the excuse that they have to
start somewhere. According to internetworldstats North America is only 18% of
the global market. Even Europe is bigger with 26%.

Sourse: (<http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm>)

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dgabriel
There are also liability issues. This service is offered to US citizens only,
possibly because their billing practices don't conform to laws of other
nations. Localization of _legal_ issues is costly and time consuming. If you
examine the member agreement linked on that page, you see the following:

3\. QUALIFICATIONS FOR MEMBERSHIP

To use the AOL Services, you must be a U.S. resident and legally able to enter
into contracts. AOL reserves the right to limit you to one free trial or
promotion of a paid subscription plan that cannot be combined with other
offers.

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mixmax
Well if startups from small European countries can deal with that, the I'm
sure large American companies can as well. If they choose to do so of course.

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dgabriel
They can, for sure, and many of them do (just not _all_ of them). It's a
decision based on the cost of legal vs. the income benefit of providing
services to the international market.

AOL has apparently decided the US is its target market. You can get better
free web mail from other sites, anyway. :)

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mixmax
he he, yes absolutely...

My point is not to downgrade American companies, it's more that I'm perplexed
why some of them are content with such a small share of the global market. If
an European startup can do it, then it seems like it is not an issue of it
being too hard or too expensive.

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davidw
Look at it as an opportunity to get into other markets first, as an
entrepreneur:-) There are lots of "copycat" sites making good money in their
home countries.

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mixmax
True. Here's an example:

In Denmark bask in the 90's a couple of guys decided to do a site like yahoo.
It was called jubii. Today they are much bigger than Yahoo in Denmark, and are
making good money, basically riping off Yahoo's concept.

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theogeer
I think there is something more insidious at work here. Well, perhaps not
Insidious, but it's not about companies trying to exclude people, at least not
in large. In honesty I think there are two culprits.

1) Stupid Developers. There are lots of developers out there who are lazy and
stupid in the bad way. They just go with what they know and don't even begin
to consider a larger audience. Think of all the uber-limited lists of job
field boxes, of the limited gender-identity options on sites, of the idiocy of
requiring an address for registration to a newspapers comments in the first
place!

2) Ignorant or unthinking management. People who make the developers require
all that stupid information in the first place. They do it because they don't
really understand that they're actively deterring business. It's a problem
with business models all over. Business leaders often don't realize that
they're making it hard for their customers, and that makes their customers
unlikely to be customers for long. If someone would sit them down and explain
to them the horrors of interface friction, and truly make them understand, I
think things could get better quickly.

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xirium
There's definitely a level of premature optimisation, although it is becoming
less common. I've lost count of the times that I've encountered forms that
only accept five digit postal codes or 10 digit telephone numbers.

Take your business elsewhere and the problem will fix itself.

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german
You are doing the same thing here in this post. America and US are two
different things.

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wheels
In English, "America" is the correct short for for the United States of
America, and "Americans" for the residents. That's not true in other languages
languages (Spanish, for example). I assume your moniker is less than accurate
as in German "Amerika" and "Amerikaner(in)" are standard terms as well.

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hernan7
Yes, in English: America = US. In Spanish: America = The Americas.

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xirium
There's a similar example in Europe, but much more benign and regarding the
water between England and France. In English it is known as the English
Channel. In French, it is known as The Channel.

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hernan7
Maybe in the case of AOL they offer those free email accounts to Americans
only so they can guarantee a more homogeneous audience to their advertisers.

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edw519
Oversight

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mixmax
explain...

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david927
Because Europe alone is a much bigger market than the US, and it's not that
hard to simply localize an app. I think this is a huge market -- localizing
the most successful apps out there. In fact, you can get the users to do it
for you. Just open the admin to allow for translated versions of pages.

Big oversight. Big opportunity.

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tim2
To only localize is to fail on so many levels.

