Starting a business in France

[john jeff]

I am thinking about starting a small scale mail order business in France but have no experience of the French tax system etc.

Any very general advice or pointers would be much appreciated. John

[idun]

I rather think that it is how you set up your business and under which regime for social security payments that are the expensive things to look at.

[john jeff]

Thanks for the steer.

I have quickly realised that the costs of running a business in France, compared with the UK for instance, are greater.

[tinabee]

This site may help

http://www.french-property.com/guides/france/working-in-france/starting-a-business/

and this one

http://www.theautoentrepreneur.com/

 

[Albert the InfoGipsy]

I very much doubt that auto-entrepreneur is a viable regime for a mail order operation.

AE allows a fixed, arbitrary level of costs against your turnover, rather than permitting you to offset expenses such as postage. It may be OK if you are shipping small, high value items where the cost of postage is quite a small part of the transaction value. It may also be worth using in the short term to allow you to test the market before going to the expense of setting up in a réel regime (which uses real cost/profit figures).

[john jeff]

Thanks tinabee

[john jeff]

Thanks Albert, as you had guessed, I was thinking of a two stage project. The first as simple as possible to test the market and keep costs down.