At first, e-retail businesses are organized and set up. Then they grow and start bringing in more sales. At some point, selling goods on local markets is no longer enough, and ambitious merchants start thinking about trading internationally so that their products can be discovered by buyers from all around the world.
Such retailers have a good chance to succeed because there are many potential customers browsing stores and comparing prices on the web at all hours from anywhere in the world. This way, they often discover more cost-effective alternatives from abroad or overseas. Demand for cross-border eCommerce services remains strong, so building a business around it can be a solid opportunity — provided you know the cross-border eCommerce challenges you're likely to face along the way.
More of the Business Outlook
Cross-border trade solutions help their clients win over customers in different countries by doing a lot of the heavy lifting for them: translating and localizing online stores, and promoting them on local marketplaces, search engines, social networks and comparison shopping websites. To make it all flow smoothly, you will need to get your ducks in a row.
To put the whole thing together, you will have to overcome a number of challenges that cross-border eCommerce solutions typically face. Each of them is examined in turn below.
Challenges, Finally
Inconsistency. Working in eCommerce makes regulatory consistency a desired but rarely achieved state of things. The industry evolves quickly, and regulators often change their minds on many issues. Take, for instance, the matter of state or cross-border sales taxes — there is a lively, ongoing debate over how and whether to apply them to electronic commerce transactions.
Ignorance of the law excuses no one. Different countries have different laws. You will have to be careful about what is allowed to be sold to whom, because the age of legal adulthood and specific product requirements vary by country. Even as a service provider rather than the merchant itself, you might be held liable for not meeting those regulations.
Data Feed Specification and Cross-Border Catalog Management. As a cross-border trade service, you will localize and promote your clients' products on different marketplaces and comparison shopping engines, such as the ones covered in this overview of popular eCommerce marketplace services. Effective cross-border catalog management means being aware of the specific feed requirements of each channel so that items are presented correctly and consistently across all of them.
Currency Wheeling and Dealing. Your clients will expect international prices to be calculated automatically. To keep them satisfied, you will have to monitor conversion rates and update item prices whenever currency exchange rates vary. Don't forget that shipping costs need to be adapted as well, whether they are shown as an additional charge or included in the price of a product advertised as having "free shipping."
Ich verstehe Sie nicht. Don't speak German? Neither might your clients or their customers — but that shouldn't be their problem. Do your best to reduce the language barrier as much as possible. You could offer a built-in translator for received emails and customizable templates in different languages to help sellers respond. On top of that, you should be able to translate keywords and product categories accurately.
Integrations as Your System's Best Friends. Your job will also involve keeping an eye on retailers' inventory and updating it whenever an item is bought on any of the international channels it is listed on. This makes order management an important feature to offer as well — it's one of the ways eCommerce platforms address international cart issues, by keeping stock levels, prices, and orders synchronized across every channel a merchant sells on.
In fact, retrieving products, categories, prices, orders, customers and other store data is one of the biggest challenges, since most features offered by a cross-border trade solution rely on getting and synchronizing this information. You will need to access the databases of merchants' stores that run on different shopping platforms, such as the ones covered in this guide to PrestaShop API integration. This is what makes integration with them necessary for any cross-border trade system, and why a reliable cross-border eCommerce API is so valuable.
How to Integrate with Multiple Shopping Platforms Fast
First, understand why "fast" is nearly impossible if you go it alone. Say you plan to start with just one popular shopping platform. If you want it done right, you will need a developer capable of writing a flawless and secure integration that won't buckle under thousands of requests. Be prepared to wait a long while and pay a premium for the integration work and its ongoing maintenance. Now multiply that effort by the number of shopping carts you would like your cross-border trade system to integrate with.
API2Cart offers a unified API that works for 70+ shopping carts as a cost-effective alternative. With one integration instead of many, you can get access to the databases of such eCommerce industry leaders as Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, PrestaShop, OpenCart, and X-Cart — as well as newer sales channels such as those covered in this guide to Facebook Marketplace integration.
To find out more about API2Cart as a solution for integrating with multiple shopping carts at once, schedule a FREE consultation by clicking on the button below.
Marketing manager, API fan, nerd, perfectionist, British humour enthusiast, literature and history geek.
