International Locale Aspects of Consideration

International eCommerce can be a very competitive space depending on the region or the country that you're focusing on. Our typical recommendation involves identifying the optimal locations that you believe will yield a sizable conversion rate on your website and result in purchases of your offerings. If you effectively optimize around those regions and countries first, you will enjoy a high ROI (i.e. return on investment) for your business.

Whether you are operating in an existing area or planning an expansion to different regions, we encourage you to leverage data and analytics to guide your decisions. This information will help you creatively iterate what's working for related competitors and provide insights that could benefit your business. It’s also possible to look at other participants in different industries that share a similar execution strategy with international eCommerce sites. In spite of them competing in a different industry, you can still draw useful information from other businesses in terms of theming, branding, styling colors, and successful workflows in that particular region.

The idea is that international eCommerce can be optimized for a locale or region, which is an action with potential to dramatically improve the conversion rate and return on investment for your eCommerce platform. Some of the key things to consider include the actual product information and data, to determine how it's optimally indexed and searched for in that particular region. You will need to assess how users are searching and what they're looking for in each particular location.

This procedure involves categories, filters, search terms, maybe even synonyms, and just generally being able to optimize the actual content in association with the products and offerings for that specific region. Everything should make sense to users who are in that area, as different cultures across locations have distinct ways of approaching and completing purchases. The corresponding dialect and its interpretation should also be taken into account, in order to achieve a comprehensible result for the end users.

Examples of Potential Tailoring Within your Platform Depending on Locale

Overall, it can be a highly significant logistical challenge to execute content and product offering optimization. But in the end, this process can yield dramatic results and impressive improvement in the conversion rate of your website. We highly encourage thinking about, and planning around, product data and content optimization. Even adjusting the product imagery, so that the models depicted are representative of that particular region wherever reasonably possible.

Another area for consideration is the language and how certain parts of the site should be appropriately customized. These include key pieces like the name, meta title, description and meta-description, which would all need to be heavily optimized so that the end user doesn't feel like they're purchasing from a foreign entity. The goal certainly isn't to be deceptive or misguide visitors, we just want users to feel comfortable with the content presentation.

In addition to presenting region and language specific content, it's also possible to configure and optimize the theming, branding, styling, color scheme and the overall presentation based on a particular location. You may have noticed that different providers across industries have already carved a niche, where their marketing and presentation can be very diverse compared to popular platforms in other regions.

A good example of that is Amazon and Alibaba, where Alibaba is essentially the Amazon of China. However, the marketing style and how the retailing portions of the sites work is quite different in many ways. There's a lot of similarity but you can observe a lot of discrepancies in terms of business logic, theming and some of the general website branding. Appropriate diversification depending on location is something you may wish to explore for your international eCommerce application.

Always Contemplate the Future Strategy and Positioning of your Business

From an overall perspective, you really want to think about the long term when you're evaluating international eCommerce solutions. Of course in the short term, it's not going to be possible, or it may be possible but unrealistic, to invest the majority of the funds on something that you know is a new market which hasn't been proven nor validated. Nonetheless, as you're continuing to build your international eCommerce platform, we would recommend looking far ahead so you can see where you eventually want to go with the global eCommerce.

If you're looking to really dominate and have a strong foothold in a particular region, then we strongly encourage you to make sure that you find a platform that will deliver the ability to adjust the theming, branding, and styling changes accordingly. This tailoring potential should be inclusive of things like the terms, documentation or privacy policies and even features like the background or other imagery, to make sure that it's matching that particular region in that locale.

If you are empowered to accomplish that, then you allow the end users who are in that region or country to be able to feel much more comfortable on a subconscious level. Perhaps users won't even realize that those details are causing their comfort, but it just matches what they're used to and are familiar with. Your international eCommerce won’t present another kind of mental block for users as they're going through their shopping experience.

Clarity International eCommerce Experts

Finally, we would love to provide additional information on this topic if you are interested. We welcome you to reach out to our friendly and knowledgeable team, as we would enjoy the opportunity to provide you with complimentary support and resources. You're also welcome to click on any of the links below and discover related international eCommerce resources. In case you are looking for support and information on any topics that you don't see covered below, we'd appreciate the chance to share supplementary resources with you. If you click on the Ask the Expert, we'll be happy to share additional information and possibly update our website to include more aspects of international eCommerce.