Depends on a shop, most of them sell in local currency (USD), my bank support any currency and do conversion for me. So, in this case I assume USD will be totally fine.
Heard of it, but newer ever saw any gateway supporting it. But it’s only me.
I’m using HA with ZigBee dongle and in second home HA Yellow which is ZigBee as well.
About ordering from a US site I can give you https://twowheelgear.com/ as an example. That’s a US company with a US-site but it has international currency conversion (at the bottom of the site) thorugh Shopify it seems. Otherwise most EU banks convert USD at a cost.
The only part about ordering from a US site is customs and VAT. It usually is quite a hefty surprise cost. So to avoid that it needs to be sent out from a warehouse in EU to avoid customs, and a 25% VAT applied in store.
When you say you need to meet 1850 Zigbee units and 1350 for Thread/Matter. Do you mean 1850+1350 or do you mean 1350 Zigbee+Thread units in total?
Personally as the consumer I’d go for the Thread/Matter for the light switches since they would be my kick-off for a Thread network with a stable ground for future Thread devices I want to buy, such as window blinds. And in the long run upgrade to Thread devices.
I’d say the popularity of Thread in EU is probably a bit lagging behind US because Apple Homekit and Apple hardware overall isn’t quite as popular here. And globally I feel like most people don’t know what Thread over Matter is and how you get started properly. I guess everyone that sells smart home solutions don’t particularly like the fact that Thread over Matter don’t lock the consumer in their ecosystem.
From the business point of view I think the wise decision is to go for Zigbee switches first to get a foot in the market since that’s what the big market knows about and knows works.
I’d personally be a bit hesitant to order Zigbee switches if I know Thread switches might be 2-3 years away at most. But for every hesitant advanced user like me there are probably 9 other consumers that would be hesitant to Thread.
Because you have to know to get a Thread Border Router (Gateway) and then you have to find what hardware to buy to get one, which is hard to find. Since most people don’t have Home Assistant Yellow (I don’t think the green has Thread support without buying a dongle).
I can’t help you much more to make the choice easier. Market research and such is tough. Most of the market is not on these forums 
If you meant 1850 Zigbee switches + 1350 Thread switches to reach the goal to be able to deliver then I’d say Zigbee is probably more worth to begin with and go for Thread/Matter later. If you meant 1350 units in total for Zigbee and Thread because of lower costs (which I doubt you meant) then I’d definitely go for that.
Well this is a perfect example as we use Shopify too! Thank you 
Makes sense – can you elaborate what it means to apply the 25% VAT in-store? We wouldn’t have any brick and mortar stores out there, but rather it would be a warehouse somewhere in the EU that would be fulfilling these orders.
Or are you saying I should collect the 25% VAT on our site and then work with whatever country the item was purchased out of to pay them?
In other words, here in the US, each state has a different sales tax and we collect sales tax based on the state that you’re in. We have to register in each state for a sales-tax license and depending on when the state collects sales-tax, we pay them (usually quarterly, but sometimes monthly). I wonder if it’s similar in the EU where I’d have to register in each country and then remit the sales tax based on their schedule.
Great question – it would be 1850 for Zigbee and 1350 for Thread/Matter, so 3200 total. I mean at the end of the day, if we sold 2500 Zigbee, we could take the extra profits and apply it towards the Thread/Matter project.
Basically, it boils down to this:
Switch A Costs (Zigbee)
Switch B Costs (Thread/Matter)
NO TOOLING COSTS
That last sentence is interesting – are there more fragmented ecosystems still? I’m curious on how popular Amazon, Apple and Google are over there are those are the main drivers of Thread/Matter for us. Primarily Apple and Google since Amazon also supports Zigbee.
Yeah, completely understand. I will say that I doubt it will be 2-3 years before Thread, but yeah I guess that really depends on how quickly Thread/Matter develops in popularity over there.
Yeah it’s even more tough bc I have zero experience with the EU and am trying not to base my assumptions on what I know the North American market is.
My gut tells me to go Zigbee bc of companies like Homey, Philips, and Home Assistant are popular over there and they all support Zigbee (although, Philips is a closed system).
Well I appreciate the honest opinion – I think my head is in a similar spot. I may actually reach out to the guys at Homey to see what they’re seeing, but my latest convo with them was that Thread/Matter is still in it’s very early stages and they’re still working on development. Home Assistant seems to be rolling it out fairly quickly, however, which does give me hope. But it brings me back to a point you made that you have to have a border router, which I’m not sure how popular those are over there (hence the Apple, Amazon, and Google question I had).
Thanks for your help!
After scouring the web all day for a smart switch that meets all of my needs I’m so relieved to come across this forum post.
I’m in the UK, so need the 240v support.
The multi-touch buttons and smart-bulb mode are the absolute winning features for me.
In terms of design:
The vertical aligned switches look best in my opinion, I think it makes it much more intuitive how to operate the switch.
Also all UK light switches are vertical in orientation, horizontal looks quite strange.
In all honesty I wish the EU design could be identical to the USA design, just with the reduced size/dimensions.
In terms of ecosystem support:
Most UK supplied companies that I have seen are heavily leaning into Matter and Thread.
Eve Energy are extremely popular and solely support Thread/Matter. Nanoleaf are similar.
It feels to me like Zigbee and other proprietary technologies are on the way out and Matter is the clear future standard.
Happy to provide further info on UK switches/specs if needed.
Think your project is amazing.
Just to add to my explanation of Thread/Matter being popular in the UK:
Here, most people use smart devices or have their first experience with them by using a home smart speaker.
The vast majority of people I know have either an Amazon Echo, Apple Homepod or Google Nest.
This means that they are already set up to use Thread/Matter devices, and will buy those listed as compatible on the Apple/Google stores.
I think Zigbee devices, third party hubs etc are both niche and expensive over here, and generally people won’t buy them as they require extra steps to configure vs just adding to their Alexa/Apple Homeapp.
Nice to hear back from you Eric! Since you’re using Shopify I think that currency conversation will be no problem. In that way you can adjust taxes etc, meaning our orders won’t be taxed by the customs when they arrive to the destination country as long as they’re sent from a EU country. 1850 units seems doable (after my order it’ll only be 1830 to break even) and in my opinion I think that zigbee is a good start… even if matter/thread is coming to grow. For example we still see a huge demand of 433mhz things so zigbee wont be gone in many many years.
You should not be scared of using your existing website. It being a .com url is what we are used to.
Hey guys, I created a poll on Reddit to help me better understand which protocol would be best. I’m still open to creating both, but I’m trying to get a few more data points to make a decision as it seems like there are some strong points for either.
If you could take a couple seconds to select either Zigbee or Thread/Matter, it would be super helpful.
https://www.reddit.com/user/InovelliUSA/comments/1dpvr5u/eu_switch_poll/
Nice, welcome! Glad to have you here
Can you elaborate or share a pic of which one you’re referencing? The one we landed on and sent off to the manufacturer is this one:
We ended up removing the lux bc it seemed like the consensus was that it was kind of a pointless option without some sort of motion sensor inside of it. We redid the favorites button so that they were easier to push (and we made two of them instead of 1).
Thanks, this is super helpful. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Eve and Nanoleaf, glad to hear they’re as prevalent over in the UK!
I think the challenge for me is understanding if, while Matter may be the future, what are people buying now? Granted, this switch will take some time to launch and by then maybe Matter will have picked up a ton of support, it still makes me a tad nervous to lead with something that may be unproven.
Haha, no problem, I think I get it now! Definitely don’t like hitting people with surprises at the border. We’ve had that happen to us with Canadian orders where they’re charged a certain amount on our site and then they would have to pay tax before it got to them. It was really weird though bc it seemed like it was a random process by customs, but I think we have it figured out now. Hopefully a similar situation with the EU.
Yeah 3200 is not a ton for us in the US – we probably sell that in a month or two of a single SKU, but Canada is about 1/10th of our US sales, so I’m trying to keep that in mind as we think of our EU numbers. I haven’t done a ton of research in terms of the population comparison and haven’t looked at the Home Automation reports that show the adaptation of HA in the EU vs Canada, so I think just to be conservative, I am just going to assume it will be about 1/10 in the EU as well.
3500 was the original break-even for one switch with the first manufacturer, so it makes me feel better that it was cut in half by the second manufacturer as 1850, is about 5-6 months worth of sales if I go off the 1/10th rule.
Another option is that we lead with one and then do some sort of stretch goal for the second one and we can start that project prior to the first one being completed.
Great insight, thanks! Interesting to hear about Amazon – I knew it was struggling a bit over there due to regulations and everything, but great to hear they’re hopefully making a comeback.
Yeah, I would love it if IKEA launched a gateway with Thread/Matter – I completely forgot about them (they aren’t as popular in the US, but I forgot how popular they are in the EU) as there’s only one in Michigan and it’s like 1.5hrs away. I’ve always wanted to go though.
Interesting, I didn’t realize Home Assistant had the ability to be a border router – I guess it’s time to update our documentation! Cool to see that.
Interesting – yeah, that’s very similar to the US. I think the mainstream market has voice assistants, but the more advanced users will buy a separate hub (SmartThings, Hubitat, Home Assistant, etc). I completely forgot about SmartThings – is that pretty popular out there?
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my TV and soundbar have built in Thread support – I think they also put it in their fridges, and maybe some other appliances, I’m not entirely sure. Curious on how Samsung fares out there.
Yeah, I think this will probably require me to setup some sort of tax license with the various countries, so I’ll have to look more into this. I know Shopify can definitely collect the taxes based on your country, but they don’t remit them on our behalf, so we may have to do that ourselves.
Good to know – I was worried about having a .com vs .eu – I even became a “digital resident” in Estonia so I could get the .eu extension haha. I have to drive to Washington, DC to get the actual paperwork though, but knowing I can just do the .com is helpful.
This was the best looking one from the mockups I thought, although ultimately I think the original US design is spot on.
What was the main driver behind having a different design to the EU model, rather than just having them be identical with different voltage/regulatory support?
It almost feels like they are separate products rather than just a US/EU compatibility check box.
I can definitely sympathise with what a large decision it is, hopefully as the only one with your feature set and 240v support it would make switches sell well.
Would also be happy to buy from a .com by the way.
Just today I’ve bought a TUO smart button and paid shipping from USA to UK because of matter support.
They sell on a .com and charge in USD.
Btw, it is amazing to be able to have conversations like this with you, I wish all businesses were like this!
Home Assistant has a great site with information about Thread: Thread - Home Assistant
I have all three integrations necessary for Matter over Thread since I use a Zonoff stick with Zigbee2MQTT in my HA Yellow and use the inbuilt hardware for Thread.
So that’s why I’m personally interested in Thread more than Zigbee. And as has been mentioned in the thread in the future there will be so many devices that can act as a Thread Border Router that you probably won’t have to think about a gateway and instead can focus on getting great devices instead.
Also, this might be interesting to you guys:
I’m seeing Home Assistant grow more and more month by month and in Tech forums in Sweden (Sweclockers.se mostly) when talking about Smart Home stuff it doesn’t take long at all until Home Assistant is mentioned or people ask if the devices are compatible with HA.
So if Inovelli could get partnered with HA and get the “Works with Home Assistant” stamp of approval I think that’d help you get customers. I suppose the switches would work locally without any cloudservice as well which for Home Assistant is the highest grade, works locally with Home assistant.
Home Assistant also does a “State of Matter” once or twice a year and if you’d somehow be a part of that as a company selling Matter over Thread switches and be a part of that stream that could also possibly boost the Thread market, and your own sales.
Do with all this information as you wish
Great question! Yeah, it’s hard to lock down a design, especially when I’m not at all familiar with EU switches and their design (I’ve actually never traveled to the EU at all – would love to!).
The main driver for a different design was that I was trying to match what I saw in pictures online (and from feedback from a former CEO who ran a large European smart home company that made switches). It looks to me like most switches were square and had the single square button to turn lights on/off.
Similar to the US, we try to keep our switches looking like normal light switches so people inside the house who aren’t used to smart home technology (or don’t want any part of it) just think the switch is a cool looking, “dumb” switch. In other words, we take the approach of mimicking a, “dumb” switch design, but add a little bit of flair.
In the US, there are two main types of switches: toggle and “decora” (or paddle style):
Toggle:
Decora/Paddle:
In our opinion, the decora/paddle style switch is more modern and so we chose that one to start our design on. Then we just simply added a light-bar to show the dim level. We figured this wouldn’t confuse non-smart home people that much and they would just think it looked like a more high-end, “dumb” switch.
As for the EU version, we explored the vertical LED Bar and, while I do think it makes more sense from a dimming perspective (ie: LED Bar goes up, so does the dim level), there were a couple of challenges with it.
The first was that I just didn’t think it looked as good aesthetically as the horizontal bar because there was a ridge between the paddle and the bar. In addition, I think once you start adding the 2 and 3 paddle options, it can get kind of overwhelming (and becomes an engineering challenge with all the LED’s)
One of the other factors is cost – if we start adding in all those additional LED’s, it can drive up the complexity from an engineering standpoint and also the additional LED’s can drive up the price (not a ton, but still drive it up). This being the first time we’ve done anything in the EU Market, we want to be competitive on pricing.
Lastly, back to aesthetics, I just think personally (again, I could be dead wrong and I’m grateful for the feedback), once you start adding additional light bars, it becomes confusing for the person who isn’t familiar with the switch (ie: non-smart home users).
That’s great news! Our goal is to have an EU distributor that will make it easier on you all, but I guess as a backup plan, we could always ship here (this would be a definite last resort as I think we’d probably incur a 25% tariff and also it would cost a lot for shipping).
Yeah definitely – I feel the same being able to talk with you all! We couldn’t come up with these ideas or learn about different markets without you, so I sincerely appreciate it
Well… we should be since we paid a ton of money to them, but that’s a story for another day lol
Thank you!
Sounds about right for Home Assistant. Pretty ridiculous if that’s their way of supporting companies like Inovelli who always supports HA and their users.
I totally agree that the LED vertically makes more sense. But from seeing your mockups so far it simply doesn’t look half as good as the horizontal edition.
Because the way EU switches are I don’t think you can do better than that. US Switches makes a bit more sense to have one led per switch because if you guys need three switches in one place you just put three of them together and make a wider hole in the wall.
EU Switches are always the same size and split the button into three instead. So you simply can’t get over that fact.
The left side of this mockup looks way better than the right side. If 3-button switches didn’t exist I think vertical would have been possible if the left button had the LED to the left and the right button had the LED on the right. So they were both “outside” the switchbutton. But since 3-button switches exist that wouldn’t make sense either.
In that mockup it looks like there is one long horizontal LED. How would that work with 2 or 3 buttons? Would the LED behind the plastic be split into three parts so the section above the corresponding button lights up and not the whole thing? In that case maybe it would be nice to have a divider of some sort to give the visual indication that the LED is in fact three for a 3-button switch for example.
That’s interesting. I hope you get your stamp from them soon then. Based on this forum post alone I feel you are worth it, and from what I’ve read about the switches themselves it seems they would meet the requirements.
Is this the site for the EU switches?
https://inovelli.com/products/blue-series-zigbee-smart-dimmer-eu-version
At the moment it only shows USD and not local currency. But the site in itself looks good (apart from the pictures in the promo material being from US switches for now) and nothing I believe people from EU would be put off from.
Apologies if it’s a silly question but will the European switch launch with multiple colours?
At this point, Inovelli is exploring to see if the European market is feasible. So since this is in the exploratory stage, I think asking about colors is a bit premature, unfortunately. Inovelli’s main concern at this point is market demand vs minimum order quantity.
Inovelli has traditionally offered paddles in different colors, but again, the question will be what the demand will be for colored paddles vs the MOQ for those paddles, IF the project moves forward to reality.
That’s completely fair I’m just very excited for this to be a reality 
Great to have fresh activity and developments! My vote would be for Thread/Matter.
Two things to note, regardless of where you host your website and storefront:
Consumer retailer EU and UK prices are almost always inclusive of VAT unless otherwise stated.
And EU to UK is going to a bit like US to Canada to deal with. If a consignment value is under £135 (without tax or shipping), the buyer won’t be hit with fees and tax is settled by the seller. If above £135 then buyer is responsible for tax, custom etc. Some sellers (Amazon) will let you pre-pay to avoid handling fees, and maybe Shopify can help with this. I imagine you won’t have a UK native distributor, but an EU distributor and shipping companies are hopefully going to be familiar with the hoops you need to jump through.
Great to see the updates!
I’m all for zigbee, surprised to see so much support for Thread/Matter. I do wish to use more of thread/matter but in the UK/Ireland I have found very few devices that are affordable and support it well.
Yeah this is what I also wanted to discuss with you guys. What I thought we could do is either the following (or we could have a firmware option to select whatever version of the below works for you):
If we do a hard divider there, it makes it a little more challenging because we’d have to figure out a way to pop off the top part.
I think for the first iteration of these switches, in order to keep the costs down, we are making it so that it is a switch that only allows for a single button. We originally wanted to create this with the ability to pop off the button and have three loads inside the switch (so you could do either 1, 2 or 3 buttons) but that added a ton to the cost of the switch and they were saying there would be both heat concerns (with three dimmers inside the switch) and space concerns.
So, if we did do a 2 or 3 paddle option, it would likely have to be On/Off only.
Hope this makes sense?
Yeah I just started to build out the page – I tried to make it harder to find until I could finish editing it, but seems you guys are too smart lol
The plan is to have the paddle pop off if you want to change colors, but my next form of research is to figure out what colors are popular. In the US, we have the following options:
However, the more popular colors are: White, Light Almond and Black. It would be tough to make a business case for the other colors in the EU as we only have one switch available now and we have to buy a minimum order of 3k units (sometimes they’ll make an exception for 1k, but I haven’t confirmed this yet). The luxury we have in the US is that we have multiple switches that can use the same paddle, so we can go through inventory faster and recoup our expenses.
Yeah, I’m excited to get back in here and with a better attitude now that it seems feasible!
Yeah this is making things challenging lol. I put a poll up on Reddit (granted, for some reason it closed early) and it’s 52% Thread/Matter, 48% Zigbee, which is a surprise to me. Probably the worst case outcome of that poll honestly haha. It just means that if I open up orders for both options, we’d have to sell 3200 switches before the project kicks off to meet the MOQ’s for both.
I was hoping it would be more like 70/30 either way, but it just goes to show how quickly Thread/Matter is catching up to every other protocol.
–
I’m going to take the day to think about this and talk it over with the team!
Edit: Just sent an email off to one of the guys at Homey to get his POV – we’ll see what he says too.
Out of curiosity, does shipping from Ireland to the UK have the same restrictions as shipping from mainland Europe???
