Your brand works at home.
Germany doesn’t know it yet.
We help European DTC brands turn Germany, Austria and Switzerland from a translated afterthought into a second home market.
Operator-led, not an agency. We run and scale multiple DTC brands in Germany and Austria ourselves, and build yours to the same standard. Everything here was learned with our own investment, our own P&L, our own mistakes.
7-figure DTC operatorDE · AT · FR · UKSince 2025Shopify · Google Ads · Klaviyo
Germany is not “also Europe”. It’s a second home market.
- 146–261
- Consumer purchasing-power index vs Europe (=100): DE 146 · AT 147 · CH 261
- €842bn
- Total B2C e-commerce in Europe, 2024. Germany is one of its largest markets
Most European DTC brands treat DACH as a translation project. It is a market entry.
What is Germany worth to your brand?
Your DACH potential, first 12 months
€1.4M – €2.3M
A planning estimate, not a forecast or a promise.
Germany
€1,509,842
Austria
€192,790
Switzerland
€217,137
Based on per-capita B2C e-commerce spend in goods (Statista Market Insights, 2024), adjusted for Beauty & Care and a first-year realization factor of 0.45. The category factor is an internal estimate.
Want the real number for your store, with the keywords and competitors behind it? Get in touch →
Why your brand fails in Germany
Seven reasons, in the order your customer meets them.
Germans buy on invoice. Without Rechnungskauf and Klarna, you lose customers who had already decided to buy, and you lose them after the decision, which is why it never shows up in your conversion rate.
German buyers detect machine translation within two sentences, and the conclusion they draw isn’t “sloppy copy”, it’s “this brand isn’t for me”. German product copy also carries more specification and less emotion than French copy. A perfect translation of a winning French page is usually a losing German one.
German buyers actively hunt for proof before giving money to an unfamiliar brand, and they hunt for specific proof. Trusted Shops, German-language reviews, a German address, a phone number that gets answered. The badges that work at home mean nothing here. You pay the cost of building trust without getting the benefit.
Germans compare longer and more systematically than almost any market in Europe. Test, Vergleich and Erfahrungen carry real volume in every category. If you don’t frame the comparison on your own product page, an affiliate site with a stake in your competitor frames it for you.
Return conditions get checked before purchase, not after. A foreign return address converts a considered purchase into an abandoned cart. German return rates also run higher than in Southern Europe. Brands that port their home margin model into Germany discover this right after they scale ad spend.
German keywords aren’t translated French keywords. Compound nouns collapse phrases into single terms, intent distributes differently, volume concentrates elsewhere. A ported campaign structure breaks at match-type level before the creative gets a fair test, and German CPCs make that diagnosis expensive.
For a considered purchase from an unfamiliar foreign brand, the buyer’s real question is what happens when something goes wrong. English support answers it badly. This is a purchase barrier, not a convenience issue.
There are about a dozen more. Which ones apply to you is what the Snapshot answers.
Three phases. In this order, for a reason.
Foundation
- Localized copy, not translation
- Payment and checkout for DE/AT/CH
- Shopify Markets
- Trust architecture
- Returns and logistics
Traffic
- Google Ads built for German search
- Shopping feed localization
- Meta creative in German
- Comparison and category content
- Landing pages
Retention & Ops
- Email flows in German
- Segmentation by market
- German customer service
- Reporting and process handover
Most brands hire a German ads freelancer and wonder why the traffic doesn’t convert. The traffic isn’t the problem.
This is for you if
- You do €1M+ online in your home market
- Your product is validated and repeat-purchase works
- You sell DTC, not primarily through marketplaces
- You’ve either never launched in DACH, or launched and it underperformed
- You have someone who can execute, or budget to have it executed
This isn’t for you if
- You’re pre-launch or pre-product-market-fit
- You want a translation service
- You want ads only, on top of a store that isn’t ready
- You’re looking for the cheapest option
- You need someone available 40 hours a week
Snapshot → Audit → Sprint → Growth.
- 01
Snapshot
Free
20 min
Where you stand + your biggest gaps
- 02
Audit
€2,500–4,000
Scales with catalog size and markets
2 weeks
Every area scored, roadmap, keyword set
- 03
Sprint
€8,000–15,000
Scales with the scope of the build
3–4 months
Full execution of the roadmap
- 04
Growth
€3,000–5,000/mo
Scales with channels and ad budget
ongoing
Ads, CRO, email, reporting
A brand doing €3M at home is looking at an estimated €1.4M–€2.3M in DACH. The Audit that maps it is €2,500–4,000; the Sprint that builds it, €8,000–15,000. The Audit fee is credited against the Sprint, and every step is a natural stopping point: you can take the roadmap and execute it in-house, and some clients do.
About
DACHCOMMERCE is Fabian and a small team, running multiple DTC brands into Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and the UK with our own investment, our own P&L, our own mistakes.
We learned these markets the expensive way: payment methods that killed conversion, translated copy that got ignored, campaign structures that worked in one country and collapsed in the next.
DACHCOMMERCE came out of those failures, and out of more than €400,000 in Google Ads spend. Now it is a method and a team that runs it. Fabian stays hands-on on strategy; the team executes each build to the same standard, and we bring in specialists where a project needs them: media buyers, developers, native copywriters.
We take on a limited number of brands at a time, and never two selling the same products.
Questions that come up.
Most brands do. A German version and a German market entry are different things. The version is a translation layer, the entry covers payment, trust, logistics and search. The Snapshot tells you which layer you’re on in about twenty minutes.
Agencies run ads. That’s most of what they can do. If the checkout doesn’t offer invoice payment and the return address is in France, better ads make the loss bigger, not smaller.
Foundation work takes 4–6 weeks before paid traffic makes sense. Meaningful revenue typically lands in month 3–4. Anyone promising faster is selling you ads on top of a broken store.
No. One brand per category, and that’s in the contract.
You don’t need to. We work in English, everything customer-facing is German, and you get a documented handover your team can operate.
Then buy the Audit and stop there. It’s built to be executed in-house. Around a third of the value is the prioritization, and that transfers.
Tell us about your brand
Where do you sell today, and where do you want to be in the German-speaking market? Send a line and we’ll come back to you. No deck, no pitch.