Lets assume you've been testing new markets and have found that you will get a good return in a specific country if you have more of a presence there. There are a lot of things you could do to optimize in a country, so where to start? Here are some helpful tips on areas to consider.
1. Fully Optimized Country Site
You could fully localise your domestic ecommerce site to the country or region you're rolling out to. This can help because it gives you control over what the buyer experiences when interacting with your brand and enables you to make sense for a market. While their are technologies that automatically localise your existing website and provide a local experience (language, sizes, currency) for buyers, they only localise what is there. For example, if you have a UK Mother's Day campaign live and localise it in Germany, you'll be doing it months ahead of Germany's Mother's Day. Likewise, showing your winter products in November makes a lot of sense in the UK, North America and Europe, but not so much in Australia.
So building out a site specifically for a country can make a lot more sense to buyers than just translating through a automated tool.
2. Country Specific Marketplaces
Focusing on a local marketplace can be another way to quickly get more traction in a country. This can give you ready access to a local market or region (think listing on Shopee in South East Asia rather than trying to work out driving buyers to your site in the region). While eBay & Amazon are the largest in Europe and America, on a country level and for specific verticals, it isn't the case. If you are getting good traction in the Netherlands for example, while both these large marketplaces are present, most people buy on bol.com, so you need to publish your items on there.
Expanding on marketplaces can also be done more cheaply than developing your platform but can increase day to day time it takes to manage. There are technologies and organisations, such as immerced, available to help.
3. Human Level Translation
Whether localizing your own site or using marketplaces to expand you'll want to consider your translation strategy. Human, machine or a combination? More detail in the next post!
4. Local Marketing
We all know that marketing is how we get traffic domestically, and it is of course how you get traffic internationally too! Listing on the right marketplace or having a local presence on your planform is the first step. While you can push traffic to your domestic listing from abroad, your conversation and RoI will be more limited.
Making sure you use the terms local buyers are searching for and advertising where buyers are looking is of course critical.
In some cases, such as with Google, you must have a local presence in the local language and currency to actively set-up marketing. In others it just makes more sense to do so before driving traffic so you don't lose customers when they come.
5. In-Country Fulfilment
Fulfilling locally, or at least within region, is the best way to optimize your shipping experience. If your products are in the country you are optimizing for you get them to your buyers much more quickly and the amount they pay for shipping will be what they expect.
It can come at a fairly significant up-front investment though so consider the following before doing so:
Do you have a large enough quantity of goods to store in multiple places?
Do you have a small amount of high selling items?
What are the shipping prices and times you offer from your domestic country to the new one? Are they acceptable?
Do your products take a long time or are they difficult to ship across borders?
What quantity of sales are you doing now and does it justify the cost of warehousing?
What are the tax implications of storing your goods in another country for shipping (there usually are some).
6. Optimized Local Pricing and Sales Campaigns
As mentioned in the first point in this list, rather than having the same sales internationally as domestically you should consider the local market. There are different timings and sometimes completely different sales seasons abroad. For example, swimwear and outdoors equipment sell better in October than in May in the Southern Hemisphere.
Mothers Day in Europe we've mentioned but there's also Children's Day and Independence Day or Thanks Giving in North America. And even more differences on a country level, such as like Singles Day in China and Constitution Day in Poland. You can, and should, benefit from such differences when optimizing locally.
7. Local Customer Service
Setting up local customer service is a quite costly step but useful if you have a question heavy business. Most retailers can manage by translating emails and using templates or chat bots until revenue in a country can pay for local CS. Questions after all are usually repeated; "where's my package?".
Some business though have many more detailed questions, especially unique products and specific technology. B2B sales can also require in language discussions and can be a barrier to entry if the language isn't in place.
8. Personalization and Loyalty
Finally, for this list, consider personalisation and loyalty the same way as you do domestically. If you're offering discounts to registered buyers or those who buy consistently over time, there's no reason you shouldn't be doing the same in a new country. If you have a loyalty card scheme online, see if the technology you use is compatible with all countries you are actively trading in.
Ultimately, when expanding actively into a new market, you should be considering it as an expansion of your domestic business so be sure to review all the areas you consider in your home country.
That's not to say you should do exactly the same, different countries have different norms and will bring you differing returns, but you should start with the intention to be all in and scale back those intentions when it doesn't make sense.
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