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It is hard to truly evaluate just what a difference the internet has made to the way business is done. There are people operating in business today, decades short of retirement age, who can comfortably remember a time when a small business could only operate within a small catchment area. Short of limited mail order opportunities, all of their customers would be walk-in custom who had had to make a specific journey to come to a store. With the internet, and eCommerce, a small at-home business with a staff of one can sell to customers across the world.
International eCommerce is still not an easy undertaking, to be clear. It involves a lot of work, coordination and a steep learning curve. But if you are prepared to navigate this complicated framework, there are more opportunities now for a smaller business than there have ever been before. As we are about to see, taking on international business can make your business stronger and more professional than you had ever imagined. And if you are yet to embark on an international eCommerce journey, then you may be interested to learn of the ways it can help you.
Doing business internationally broadens your horizons
Of course doing business across borders will open up a new front and a new world for you in a market sense, but it goes beyond that. Working to attract customers beyond your conventional catchment area means thinking about what a customer wants in a new way. If your business is based in Portland and you start opening up to customers in Mexico, how you market yourself and your products will, by nature, be different. Selling to customers in a new place can mean thinking about how your product or service will work in a different culture, a different jurisdiction and a different climate – and it forces you to become more broad-sighted, which will benefit your business both internationally and domestically.
International eCommerce introduces new challenges
To deliver a product to someone two towns across means paying for the transit (or instructing your own driver) and simply letting the delivery system do the rest. When you’re selling to people in other countries, you need to think about a whole different system and a different structure. If your customers are, increasingly, located abroad you’ll need to look for quick and reliable customs broker services who can move your product with a minimum of delays and who keep you informed about timeframes. The quicker and more efficiently you can deliver to another country, the more you grow your potential customer base – not by addition, but by multiplication.
Selling to new countries offers opportunities for you
If you work locally, you’re conditioned to think locally, and the connections and contacts you make will be local. Working across borders may initially simply mean that you’re selling products and services to addresses that end with a country rather than a city or state. But the more you work across borders, the more of a reputation your business builds and the more you will come into contact with people in your new market. This can open up the chance to work more closely with international partners and even visit those destinations for yourself – perhaps even opening facilities on the ground in new areas, which can be exhilarating.
An international focus can teach you new things about your local area
If you’re selling abroad, you may find yourself needing to work in another language, potentially one which you either don’t speak or read, or in which you aren’t confident doing business. This may lead you to look for assistance in your local area – a Spanish translator working nearby, or someone who can place a phone call in Italian. You may already be employing someone who is fluent or near-fluent in another language. Often we can be blind to the ingenuity and diversity of our own local area until we come to need it – but forming an international business in your own home can awaken you to what’s already there.
Any business will become stronger the more you expand its base, which is why international eCommerce, with all of its new challenges and lessons, is an excellent way to give your business more of a three-dimensional feel. It can take you from being a local small business to being something much more, and the journey can be educational, fascinating, exciting and enriching in so many different ways. There is a learning curve to be navigated, but once you’re on the way, you’ll never look back.
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