Selling dental products online in Europe: a guide for suppliers
For a manufacturer or distributor of dental products, Europe is both the closest market and the most overlooked. Twenty-seven countries, no customs, the same currency in most of them, and dental practices that buy the same dental supplies every month that you already sell at home.
Yet most companies sell only in their own country, or abroad only through a distributor. Not for lack of product, but because selling directly across borders brings four practical problems that, taken together, put people off.
Before looking at them, it is worth being clear about the possible routes. There are three: rely on a distributor or dental depot in the destination country, open your own multilingual online shop, or sell through a marketplace that already reaches those customers.
A distributor brings relationships and local presence, but keeps a substantial share of the margin and decides which of your products to push. Your own shop gives you full control, but leaves all the work to you, including the hardest part: being found. A marketplace sits in between: less control than your own shop, far less work, and a cost that usually depends on sales.
Whichever route you choose, there is one thing to sort out first. Most dental products are medical devices, and the European regulation on medical devices requires labels and instructions to be in the language set by each Member State. If a product only has instructions in one language, the problem is not the sales channel: it is the product itself, which is not ready for that country.
The first obstacle is the language of the catalogue. A German or Polish dentist will not buy from a product page in another language, however good the product. You need well-translated product pages, with the right technical terms, and a search that works in the customer's language.
The second is VAT. Between businesses with a valid EU VAT number, which can be checked in the VIES database, the sale is normally VAT-free, with the reverse charge applied by the customer. If the customer does not have a VAT number active for intra-EU trade, the rules change and may mean applying the VAT of their country. This is one of the points where it pays to be advised by an accountant, and one of the reasons many companies give up.
The third is getting paid. Selling to a practice you do not know, in another country, means exposing yourself to the risk of not being paid, with debt collection abroad that is slow and costly. Payment in advance solves the problem, but only if the customer trusts you enough to pay first.
The fourth is shipping: a courier that collects from you and delivers across Europe, clear rates by weight and destination, and orderly handling of returns and undelivered parcels.
None of these obstacles is insurmountable on its own. It is the sum that stops companies: to sell to a single practice in Germany, all four have to be solved.
That is why we built Oralzon. Suppliers upload their catalogue, even straight from their own Excel price list, and product pages appear in eight languages. VAT is calculated automatically by country, with a VIES check of the customer's VAT number. The customer pays when ordering, through Stripe, and the supplier is paid once delivery is confirmed. The shipping label is generated by the platform.
It is not the only route, and for some products, such as equipment that needs installation and servicing, a local distributor is often still the best choice. But for consumables, which a practice reorders every month, selling directly online is the simplest way to test a foreign market without fixed costs.
If you want to see how it works in practice, you can look at the vendor dashboard in a demo store, without signing up.
In short: Europe is a close and accessible market, the routes are a distributor, your own shop or a marketplace, products must first have labels and instructions in the required languages, and the real obstacles are four, languages, VAT, payments and shipping, which are best solved all together.