How to Sell Online Abroad (1)

Surely, taking into account the results of your online store, you have considered more than once the possibility of scaling your business and selling beyond your borders. A good idea, no doubt.

We will always encourage you to grow, but there are certain things worth knowing before trading internationally. To make things a bit easier for you, we have prepared a small series of posts that will clear up some doubts and warn you about issues you may not have considered yet.

At first, yes, of course. This does not mean that in all cases it is convenient, only that, in general terms, it is usually a recommended option.

When? Especially in these situations:

It is true that there are thousands of reasons, as many as companies, but if you are thinking of selling online abroad, it is likely that you will see yourself reflected in one of these five cases (or a combination of several of them).

Obviously, internationalizing an eCommerce also has certain risks and conditions that you should consider. For example:

Throughout this series of articles we will be publishing on our blog, we will give you as complete a perspective as possible on what it means to internationalize, practical advice, and some good examples of eCommerce that have managed to do it well, so you can be inspired by real success stories.

We will be covering stages, from market research or logistics to the legal, fiscal part, adapting our online store and communication strategy.

The idea is that by the time we finish the last post, you have a complete guide to selling online abroad, from A to Z.

It is necessary to understand how they work, the public's preferences, who the leaders are, potential threats and strengths.

This is a delicate part of the process because the success of your business internationalization largely depends on this analysis. That is why I recommend that you dedicate some time to it.

Since it is an internationalization, you have the advantage of having a target to work on. Globalization helps to sell the same product to people with a more homogeneous profile than just a couple of decades ago.

Anyway, it is advisable not to assume that people are the same in Spain, Germany, or Portugal, despite being within that same segment.

These things are better understood with an example. Imagine you sell bicycles online and more or less you have a series of customer archetypes or buyer personas.

The national user uses it for exercise and occasional commutes, however, if you plan to sell in the Netherlands, bicycle users use them daily as a means of transport.

This radically affects your marketing, communication strategy and the product you are going to sell in each country, which will not be the same.

Take the example of Santafixie, whom we talked about on this blog many years ago. Do they have the same product for all countries? Sure, they sell the same bicycles, but not in the same way.

Look, for instance, at their blog. Part of its content is directly translated, but there is a percentage of it that is created specifically for each country. The same suit does not fit all audiences (nor for local SEO).

Here I recommend two alternatives that are also complementary:

Within good benchmarking, trend analysis cannot be missed, what conditions the audience we have identified as the target. They can be socio-economic, geographical variables… In this section, I will be very practical.

Here I recommend always using some tools, especially the free ones.

The first thing you need to know is how your product is sold in different markets, languages, and even dialects. Ubersuggest is a keyword research tool based on Google that can very well solve that first approach.

Continuing with the example of fixed-gear bikes, to make it more niche, and with the Italian market as a reference, we search on Ubersuggest for the terms:

If you want to delve a little deeper, the best thing is to add Google Trends to this process. Its history is very useful and also provides us with additional information very segmented by areas.

We do not have enough; all information is useful. That is why we are going to turn to a potential competitor: nothing less than Amazon. In this case, we will go to Amazon.it. Look at how many ideas you can get from the internal search engine and filters. For example, we find the words “bici da strada” and “bici da città”.