EU4Digital - Virtual Warehouse for traders from eastern partnerships

With the EU4Digital initiative, the European Union wants to extend the benefits of the European Union’s Digital Single Market to the Eastern partner states. Among them: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. The primary goals here are to channel the potential of the digital economy and society, enable economic growth, promote job creation and support entrepreneurship.

At the heart of the initiative is the three-year EU-funded “EU4Digital Facility” program (2019-2022). Included in this is the promotion of the digital economy and society in line with EU standards. Harmonizing digital markets is one of the EU’s key policy objectives to deliver tangible results to citizens in the Eastern Partnership. The challenge now was to help countries outside the EU trade within the EU. To date, there were difficulties for traders to sell products directly to EU end-users and major challenges existed in the areas of shipping and taxation. Selling through large (European) marketplaces was also not as easy.

The solution was multi-faceted:

• Creating a virtual warehouse that sellers could use to sell their goods to the EU.
• Connecting to major marketplaces to reach and build a customer base
• Establishing links with local governments in countries to align tax and shipping formalities
• Creating the possibility to manage the system through a backend

We were able to fully finalize this project and developed a virtual warehouse, including a backend system based on microservice architecture. A headless system allows countries to connect quickly and provides local sellers with the ability to upload products to a virtual warehouse that can be offered on eBay and Amazon, for example. In the process, we were able to fully automate the sales process, which countries such as Georgia and Azerbaijan can now use.