E-commerce Wine Industry

[lingxiao]

Hello,

I'm totally new in this forum and need some help to set up our e-commerce infrastructure.

I have a digital agency based in Hong Kong and would like to sell wine online in various Asian markets including Mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, etc. We sell the wine of our partner distributors who are based in these countries and have already imported the wine totally legally in the country (and they have the license to sell wine in their respective market). So, we would simply like to help them selling their wine online by providing e-commerce websites with ready-made checkout and payment processes.

However, we are facing some issues to set up a Stripe account. They are telling us that we should have our own license to sell wine and cannot be an intermediate e-commerce platform selling the wine of our clients (the distributors).

Furthermore, we have the problem that our bank account is based in Puerto Rico, not in the same jurisdiction of our company and most of the payment gateways don't allow that.

We are thinking to open a company + bank account in Belize or Cyprus. However, we have still some doubts that we will succeed to open a Merchant account which allows wine sales with this kind of setup.

Do you have any recommendations about the setup we should consider? And how we can proceed to open a merchant account that allows us to sell the wine of our clients?

Many thanks in advance for your great help and best regards

 

[SaintVince]

Interesting idea. So essentially this is either dropshipping/or affiliate marketing type of business to Stripe and similar EMIs.
In Asia, there are more Alipay/wechat pay/line/union pay etc. Maybe have a look at setting those payments first.

also for Hong Kong there are several local banks that will open you account and payment processing facilities.

 

[lingxiao]

Interesting idea. So essentially this is either dropshipping/or affiliate marketing type of business to Stripe and similar EMIs.
In Asia, there are more Alipay/wechat pay/line/union pay etc. Maybe have a look at setting those payments first.

also for Hong Kong there are several local banks that will open you account and payment processing facilities.

Hello SaintVince, many thanks for your swift reply and advice Yes, it's like dropshipping. We are particularly considering payment gateways like Adyen and Omise which offers these kinds of payment methods.

We would like to open a bank account in Hong Kong, but the initial deposit is quite too high (USD 10K if we are not mistaken). Do you know any way to open HK bank account with a lower deposit?

Cheers