In a recent InternetRetailing webinar, Ecommerce: strategies to expand your international presence, we heard from Howard West, head of global strategy at Digital River, who focused on how to plan strategies that give international shoppers what they need from your retail website. Here’s a bulletpoint overview.
Global ecommerce market and trends
• Understand analyst data, comparing international trends with those on your website.
• Think: does the information translate into online shoppers who buy from you?
• Understand what categories of products sell well online [charts] and where shoppers are more likely to buy [charts].
• According to AT Kearney, 84% of Chinese shoppers prefer to shop online, 64% in Germany and Brazil, 57% in UK and 52% US.
Strategies for expanding your business globally
• Where do I go next? How do I get there?
• Focus on language, payments, customer support fulfillment, customer experience.
“The important point to make when building out language strategy is that there’s a difference between just translating your site and truly localising it, so your shopping cart eperience for one country may be completedly different for another country. Recognising not just language but colours, where you put the buy button and what the checkout flow is going to be. As you truly look to building out your language strategy you’re going to go from an international capability of building out that site where a consumer knows they are on an international site, to truly localising it to the point where they believe they’re on a local site, the local version of your company. Once you go global, you must go local.”
• In payments that means offering local payments as well as international options: which credit cards are the most common alternates is important.
• Important for customer support to be local as well, in order to answer shoppers’ queries. Email, live chat, phone, social media.
• Fulfillment: from where-to-buy to cross border, international fulfillment to local warehouse. Progression from international to local.
• Important to define your focus: which countries first?
• Crawl, walk, run model for going global [chart].
The webinar was followed by a Q&A session. To see the webinar and the Q&A session in full, visit the Digital River webinar page here.
