Leveraging our scale to support localised growth

Going international is a proven and effective rapid growth strategy, but expanding your eCommerce offer into global markets will backfire if you don’t master some basic steps.

The global cross-border eCommerce market is projected to reach over $1.5 Trillion by 2027, up from $532 Billion in 2020. Growing at an annual rate of over 15%, the benefits of going international are massive – if you get the basic steps right.

LANGUAGE

If you already generate plenty of online sales in your domestic market, you might be tempted to simply translate your eCommerce site into your target market language, but taking shortcuts, like neural machine translation (MT), could actually make the move more difficult, because it doesn’t take into account local contextual and cultural details and you’re far more likely to win over new customers when you make the effort to make their experience similar to ‘local’ brands.

While localisation is more time-consuming than a basic translation, it’s a good investment that will pay off in additional sales and you can always use MT to make the initial translation, before getting the ‘local’ experts in.

CULTURE

Moving into new markets means considering and adapting to cultural differences, because the content that’s successful with one target audience, may not trigger the same reaction in another region. Audiences in different countries may have very different perceptions and values, so while some content may be perfectly acceptable in western countries, it could easily be offensive, inappropriate or irrelevant elsewhere.

Consider also translation of web site metadata, alt tags and keywords, which are needed to align with your SEO strategy.

You’ll also need to consider return and exchange policies. While many countries have a no-questions-asked return policy, shoppers in other countries assume that purchases are final, and in others, stores won’t accept returns for arbitrary reasons.

CHECKOUT

Localising the checkout experience is as critical as the translation, because local buyers are likely to abandon their cart, if there’s anything they don’t understand, or the product price is out of step with the prevailing market.

Sales are also at risk if the product isn’t available in the local currency (usually), if the payment options are unfamiliar and if fields are not localised.

MARKETING

Branding strategies, colour palettes, key messages and marketing campaigns should all be evaluated and adapted as appropriate.

Altering product shot backgrounds and using models from your target market will go a long way to making your site and marketing more ‘localised’.  

OPERATION

Customer service is equally as important for your international markets as it is for your domestic ones, so you will either need to make sure that your existing team and resources are equipped to handle expansion and that team members have the relevant languages and international experience, or you need to hire an entirely new team and establish all new processes.

The biggest challenges that business owners face in global eCommerce are nearly all shipping and logistics related including, customs, cross-border shipping and returns, managing delivery expectations and tracking deliveries.

Online retailers that offer premium delivery services typically grow 60% faster, so while it may be easier to offer standard delivery options, the expedited alternative will deliver most value.

NOATUM

Alternatively – if you don’t want to learn new languages, build separate teams and budgets, for domestic and global operations – you can entrust your cross-border shipping, order fulfilment, parcel delivery, returns and customer service to Noatum eSolutions.

With dedicated regional eCommerce fulfilment centres, Noatum offices in 22 countries and partners in over 100 more, we have the scale, resources and capabilities to extend your markets with localised shopping experiences.

We offer global economy and express delivery services for international parcels, together with bulk cross-border shipment and local post delivery, for eCommerce companies looking to grow their global business remotely.

And when you’re ready to serve international markets ‘locally’ our scalable international eCommerce solutions support sudden demand spikes in any region, as well as long-term growth, together with a focus on the end-customer, with customer service and delivery options that differentiates their experience and encourages loyalty with your brand.