How to launch your brand in a new territory

Introduction

Expanding internationally can be a strategic move for an eCommerce brand to drive growth and increase profitability. There is a considerable opportunity, with international eCommerce expected to surpass $8 trillion by 2027 (source: business.com). There are several reasons why many eCommerce businesses choose to expand by launching in new territories:

• Access to a larger customer base
• Diversification of risk
• Seasonal sales balancing

In this guide, we'll discuss how to plan your international expansion, the steps you need to take to implement your strategy, resource considerations, and operational challenges.

When launching internationally, it's important to consider several factors to ensure success; above all, you need to plan carefully and set expectations. When building your strategy, consider the following:

Market Research

Understand the overall demand for your products in your target country. Just because your product is popular in your home market does not mean it will be in others. Research the market, look at social media for any coverage you are already getting, and find similar brands and products.

Rules and Regulations

Before entering a new region, ensure you're up to date on any laws or restrictions regarding selling or shipping your items in that location. Ensure your products aren't on restricted or prohibited items lists. Even seemingly harmless components like batteries can be restricted.

Marketplaces vs. Online Stores

Decide whether to sell in an existing marketplace or build your own online store. Marketplaces handle order fulfilment and local sales tax but have higher platform costs. With your own store, you control your brand and business, but the international fulfilment process can be complex.

Localisation

Build trust with potential shoppers by ensuring they understand all the information on your store. There are generally three stages to localising your website:

• Ship to the new market
• Translate into the language & add the local currency
• Full website for the market, with unique content in the local language and currency

Local Currencies

When adding a new currency, there are three ways to approach it:

• Add a currency conversion to the website but transact in your base currency
• Add a currency conversion to the website and transact in that currency
• Maintain a separate price list for that currency, display and transact in that currency

Payment Provider

Popular payment methods can differ from country to country, making sure you have the popular methods available is important.

Fulfilment and Shipping

Are you going to ship from your home market or establish a local warehouse? A local warehouse allows you to ship faster with no customs or duties issues. If shipping from your home market, look into costs for shipping internationally, including taxes, fees, duties, and tariffs. In particular, you need to decide if you are going to ship goods DDP (Delivered Duty Paid) or DDU (Delivered Duty Unpaid). DDP provides a much better customer experience.

Merchant of Record

You have two choices when shipping internationally: you can set up payments and handle tax & duties yourself, or you can use a Merchant of Record service to handle this for you. These services provide the following:

• Payment processing
• Tax & Duties
• Compliance & Fraud prevention

Marketing

Establishing your brand in advance is a huge boost; this could be through wholesale, pop-ups, or selling through marketplaces. Focus on a specific region—the US, China, or the EU are all huge markets. You can't target the whole market, so focus on a specific area; in the case of the US, either the West Coast, East Coast, or a specific state. For China, focus on specific tiers.

Customer Service

Selling internationally may bring a new set of customer complaints, especially regarding sizes, shipping times, and refunds and returns. You will need to consider languages supported by your team and make sure you respond to customers quickly, respectfully, and professionally. Word-of-mouth recommendations are the best marketing.

Returns

Always a challenging subject, particularly if you are shipping from your home market—make sure you have a plan for handling returns.

Cultural Fluency

Every country is different in many ways; having local knowledge and advice is crucial.

How to Implement

Marketing

• Plan your go-to-market strategy first. Are you already shipping orders to the market?
• Can you start with wholesale to build brand recognition?
• Can you open stores or pop-ups in advance of online, or vice versa?
• Localise your PR, SEO, Paid and affiliate languages.
• Establish a benchmark: what will be your entry point to the market?
• Get advice from people who are native to the market and visit yourself.

Website

• Define your approach for localisation (either 1, 2, or 3 as defined above). You can start with one and progress to 2 and then 3.
• Depending on this, you then need to decide on the domain structure. Your choices are:
  • A single website with a language selector (and currency selector). Typically, this would be either:
    Sub-domains: The default language on the main domain www.gpmd.co.uk and a sub-domain for each language, e.g., fr.gpmd.co.uk, de.gpmd.co.uk.
    Sub-folders: e.g., www.gpmd.co.uk/fr/ for French, www.gpmd.co.uk/de/ for German.
  • A separate website (domain) for each region or country. This can be done either using TLD (Top-Level Domains) or sub-domains (both work well):
    TLDs: shoesforcrews.com for the US, shoesforcrews.ie for Ireland, shoesforcrews.fr for France, etc. Matching TLDs are preferred, but if one country is not available, go for a close alternative.
    Sub-folders: uk.muji.eu for the UK, france.muji.eu for France, germany.muji.eu for Germany, etc.
• Define how best to approach this in your eCommerce platform.
• Get the technical SEO correct; there are multiple factors to consider here. Check out the moz.com guide to international SEO or book a consultation with us.
• Define your approach for managing multiple currencies. Typically, we find a fixed price list is the most common for our clients, allowing you to control the price charged for each product manually. If using conversion, make sure you define a rounding rule.
• When translating your website, define how this will be done. Which translation service will you use?
• Localise your emails and customer communication.

Shipping & Logistics
Decide if you are going to use a Merchant of Record service.
Get HS codes and country of origin for every product.

Shipping from home market
Create a template for commercial invoices and define the process for creating them for each order. This can be (Sufio app for Shopify or Linnworks).

Decide if you are going to deliver DDP or DDU.

Update your website to clearly message the international shipping options. If delivering DDU, provide an estimate of duties so your customers know what to expect.

Define a returns process for international orders.

‍Local warehouse
Define shipping costs for customer orders.
Define a returns process.

Customer service & returns
Make sure you have localised your customer service pages and FAQs.
Do you have native-speaking customer service agents for the market you’re expanding into?

How to measure impact

When launching into a new market, there is only one measure to look at – profitability. Typically, this can take three years to establish your brand and reach profitability.

Resources

• Functional & Fabulous Podcase with Ntola Obazee
• Merchant of Record, What it is and why you need it
• Global Ecommerce Leaders Forum

Need help?

We have extensive experience helping brands sell internationally. BOOK A FREE CONSULTATION to discuss your requirements.