The internet has united different regions across the world and physical boundaries are no longer an obstacle for businesses to reach the global marketplace. Moreover, with the increasing purchasing power of people and worldwide development, you can find your customers everywhere.
With the rising opportunities in the e-commerce industry and the convenience offered by WooCommerce shipping, it has become seamless for everyone to start an online store and scale their business to a global level by shipping the products internationally. However, before you begin with this, ensure that your website is ready for attracting and engaging international customers and you have done extensive research. Let’s begin with understanding how you can optimize your e-commerce store and make it appealing for your international customers:
1. Get Your Website Ready
Before you open your e-commerce store to international customers, make sure your website is friendly and inviting for shoppers from across the world. You can take the following steps to prepare your website:
- Multiple Language Support
Though you may find English-language speakers across the world, you will be able to reach a larger audience if you support the native languages of your target countries. You can consider translating your website into a few widely spoken languages, which will allow you to speak directly to your customers present in the target areas. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that your translated text is sensitive to local phrasing and culture. You can do this by getting your content properly and professionally translated.
From a tech point of view, you’d want to support multiple copies of your e-commerce shop but keep your inventory linked to an extension like MultilingualPress. Additionally, if you are using WooCommerce Payments extension, you can easily display prices in the local currencies of your shoppers.
- Reliable Infrastructure
When evaluating the focus areas of your international sales, it is vital to consider the availability of infrastructure in other countries. In order to keep your customers happy and loyal and protect your company’s reputation, you would want to ensure that your products are delivered on time and reliable. But, how to do that while sitting in another country? By performing research to ensure that road and air transportation are well-established in every country that you want to include. Also, ensure that expectations about delivery times are explicit and clear for your customers in all the supported areas. Finding a reputable delivery partner having international shipping experience would be the best option to determine the expected delivery time for your customers.
- International Payment Gateways
In various regions of the world, online transactions are usually completed by either digital wallets like Amazon Pay, Braintree, PayPal or through eTransfer. You can also explore fully integrated WooCommerce payment extensions to understand which option works best for your audience.
As the probability of customers purchasing from your e-commerce store increases when you offer the customers their preferred payment method, adding payment options to your website will benefit you as a business owner and add to the convenience of your customers.
2. Knowing the Right Laws and Regulations
Calculating tax and duty on the imported items would be a tedious and strenuous task for every business owner. Moreover, this might be one of the major reasons that many people step back from expanding their online stores globally. However, all it requires is research.
For some countries, you may leave the VAT calculations as well as collections to your delivery service partner, however, for customer satisfaction, it is always preferable to give your customers the estimated cost in advance. If possible, include the calculation of applicable taxes on the checkout page itself. For instance, for US-based online stores, fully integrated WooCommerce shipping extension with DHL for international shipping can be the best option.
Lastly, it is important to know about the required paperwork for shipping your products internationally, which might include invoices, waybills, or additional forms for restricted and specialty items.
3. Build an International Clientele
As connecting with international customers and having them trust in your products can take some time, you would need some patience here. From your end, you just need to ensure that you have robust and streamlined processes in place for launching your e-commerce store smoothly and ironing out glitches if any as the first few buyers place their orders. Once everything starts working fine, you can scale and expand your business to other regions. A few strategies that you can deploy are:
- Announcing new shipping areas clearly
- Research local sales techniques and cultural norms
- Building trust with customers by giving a detailed explanation of your policies
Now is the Right Time to Expand Your Business Globally
Having read through the tips to start shipping internationally and expanding your business globally with WooCommerce, are you ready to scale your business? You can do that seamlessly with extensive research, WooCommerce plugin and other agile extensions and get the best possible rates, guidance with packing and tracking of shipment as well as procedures that are involved in international shipping.
International shipping can help your e-commerce store grow at double speed, so where are you at? Kick start your e-commerce business as now is the right time to expand your business globally.
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