Shopify's time to market and scaled growth potential are what make this e-commerce solution so popular. Its user-friendly interface and feature set make it a joy to use. Store owners have a lot of say over the strategic direction of their stores, including seeking out new markets.
Shopify is a powerful eCommerce platform that supports store owners as they develop their brands and consider going global. Then obstacles start appearing for the traders. Scaling a single Shopify store to sell internationally is impossible. You receive constrained options, run the risk of expensive currency changes, and pay conversion costs. Because of this, a lot of global firms decide to use a multi-store architecture and design unique Shopify instances for every market. This method provides retailers with greater localization flexibility than a single shop. But it is less than ideal because it results in data duplication, challenging store management, and higher infrastructure expenditures.
Let's understand what it takes to scale your Shopify store to start selling globally with a few simple strategies.
Is international eCommerce right for your Shopify Store? And why should you go global with your store?
There are many ways to scale your Shopify store, and one of them is by expanding internationally. But it has a significant potential return on investment and can help your company grow. You can check out some of these blogs if you want to improve the SEO of your shopify store.
The possibility for significant increases in revenue that come from growing your customer base is the main justification for going global. You could make a ton of sales from the sheer amount of new clients you could reach in untapped markets. Furthermore, expanding worldwide does not preclude alternative forms of scaling. This would also help with eCommerce valuation whenever you feel like handing your business over.
Almost any strategy that can be used to grow domestically can also be used to scale internationally. International marketing is not limited to B2C sales, but B2B Wholesale marketplaces are also possible to scale up across the national boundaries. You can launch new products or aim for other market niches depending on the opportunities that you tap into in the International market. Social media can be used to reach out and advertise your products to reach out to new customers. And will discuss what other strategies can help you take the leap of success.
Quick pre-check before setting up your global strategy in place
Are you in place for international shipping?
One of the largest first challenges is shipping orders. If you have a lot of success in a particular nation, you can work with partners to manufacture and store goods close to your clients, and you can also employ local transportation companies. However, all of that is incredibly expensive. Therefore, shipping is the toughest difficulty in the beginning.
Does your product have a market?
Are your customers in your target market likely to purchase from you? Will they genuinely understand the value proposition? People throughout the world have varied opinions on their homes, clothes, and cuisine. Their daily struggles and cultural influences differ. Hence, it's important to see the cultural compatibility of the product before stepping into the marketing.
Is your product technologically fit for the market?
Global technology standards could make it so that your product succeeds in one market but fails in another. The form and the type of current used in different electrical outlets around the world vary. There are various standards for phones around the world. Therefore, you should make sure that you have a fit before you send too many orders if you are selling anything that needs to be plugged in, attached, etc.
6 factors to consider for scaling up your Shopify Store to start selling globally
Create a local experience
Creating a local experience for the market you choose to carry on with is an important element in scaling up your business to start selling globally. Following are a few important factors that are needed to make the customer experience and your business a success.
Displaying prices in local currency
Did you know that 92% of users prefer to browse and buy products on websites that display prices in their native currency? Therefore, you must make sure that the prices on your website are shown in the users' native currency. Currency conversion can be used to do this.
Displaying content in the local language
Your consumers' understanding of your product and your ability to close the sale depends greatly on the content you produce. As a result, you need to translate the content if you wish to reach markets that speak languages other than English.
Displaying the right details to the right customer
You must make sure that your consumer is seeing the appropriate content and pricing based on their region once you have localized your content and pricing.
Get the set-up to accept international payments
The capacity to accept payments is one of the most important characteristics that differentiate an eCommerce store from a typical website. You must set up your store to accept foreign payments if you plan to transact business internationally.
Merchants who meet specific requirements can request international payments through payment gateways like RazorPay. For higher conversion, it is advised that you set up high-trust or locally renowned payment gateway providers like PayPal.
Chatbot Automation and Customer Success
The moment you start dealing with international clients and expand your business horizons to a new country, customer success can not get back to the back burner. Rather, customer success and experience become important aspects that can make or break a brand. Other than that, handling international customers and their queries on time seems difficult, given the differences in time zones. Hence, it's of utmost importance to deploy AI-driven Chatbots that can engage with customers across the boundaries 24/7 without any human assistance. These chatbots can support customers on the website and ease the shopping experience.
Engati is an AI platform dedicated to making your consumers' lives easier. Engati is constantly exploring methods to assist you to save customer effort while increasing customer happiness.
Following are the ways Engati can help your business grow internationally:
- 50+ Languages in which your customers can interact with the brand.
- Omnichannel support with one view inbox that helps you keep track of all the customer interactions from various digital platforms.
- Analytics and insights to understand the impact of marketing campaigns and your customers.
Offer international shipping and fulfillment
How your customers will receive their purchases is one of the most crucial aspects of the purchasing process. To minimize friction for your new customers and minimize the cost of shipping internationally, take into account the following strategies:
- Speak with the shipping company of your choice about costs and possibilities. You'll want to confirm that the carrier of your choice offers transparent pricing and that it ships to the market(s) of your choice. Test an overseas checkout yourself to mimic the buyer experience if you're using carrier-calculated shipping.
- Transparency is valued by clients, so if you fulfill your shipping commitments rather than concealing extended delivery periods, you'll win their loyalty. Give shipping times in your product descriptions so that customers know what to anticipate.
International domains (if needed)
The simplicity with which various domains can be connected to the same store dashboard is another fantastic feature of Shopify Markets. By expanding the organic reach and SERP, using a foreign domain can significantly improve your stores' SEO in regional regions.
The best thing about Shopify Markets is that, after your new domains have been created, Shopify will automatically develop region-specific SEO tags, which will boost your SERP and conversion rates.
Another intriguing feature is that Shopify will use a customer's IP address to guide them to the appropriate storefront based on their location if they accidentally land on the wrong domain.
Social media and paid marketing
Advertising is a successful strategy to build demand while generating traffic from your global target market and testing your local offering at the same time. For people visiting your website for the first time from a different country or region, it is extremely crucial to minimize friction for new customers. Therefore, it's crucial to develop region-specific campaigns that particularly target your international customers, regardless of the platforms you intend to promote. For instance, create distinct campaigns for your new buyer-focused advertising in the Facebook Ads Manager. Make sure the destination URLs reflect the international domains you have set up for each market and localize the copy and artwork.
Make sure these campaigns are also tailored to your buyers' tastes if you utilize dynamic retargeting on sites like Facebook, Google, or Pinterest by presenting their local prices and language, if relevant. To display the same pricing and text for your online store, you must set up a product feed from Shopify that supports numerous currencies and languages. For a targeted Google solution, we advise looking at DataFeed Watch or Multiple Google Shopping feeds.
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