Succeed in Overseas Markets by Localizing your Storefront

Creating local shopping experiences in overseas markets is the playbook for success, don't be limited by your ecommerce platform.

It's the first thing a visitor sees when they access the 29 Next website:

Sell More Products in More Places

The ability to sell products to markets around the world is a reality that nearly every DTC brand aspires to. Confident brands with expansion goals set their sights on foreign frontiers with high growth potential. But managing operations on an international level is historically difficult (and expensive!)

Our latest update simplifies managing sales in international markets by offering multi-language and multi-currency product variants and collated sales reporting within a single back-end.

With this latest update, merchants on 29 Next can do the following from a single back-end dashboard:

  • Manage sales in multiple countries
  • Create language-specific marketing materials (landing pages, product descriptions, funnels, etc)
  • Set currency-specific prices for each market
  • Ship products from multiple regional fulfillment providers
  • View and analyze aggregate sales data across all markets

Let’s explore how these updates benefit multinational brands and give them the best chance to not only succeed in a foreign market, but excel as a multinational brand.

Deliver a Local Shopping Experience

The playbook for international expansion is quite clear. If you want to succeed overseas, you need to localize your offers.

There are notable examples from large brands to learn from, such as KFC outpacing McDonald’s in China by localizing its menu for Chinese palates, or Starbucks’s corporate coffee culture failing to capture the hearts of Australian artisan coffee connoisseurs.

Trying to convert that local audience into liking your product has been proven to be a long and painful road that often fails, which is why successful brands deploy localization strategies to capture the local audience.

The numbers back these examples up as well.

Customers overwhelmingly prefer a local experience when shopping online, with 75% of global customers wanting to purchase goods in their native language. More saliently as it pertains to ecommerce, over 92% of global consumers want to make purchases in their local currency.

In short, if you want your digital brand to succeed in a foreign market, you need:

  • Your website content written in the local language
  • Your marketing materials tailored to the local audience
  • Pricing in the local currency with preferred local payment methods.

On 29 Next, this is easy to manage. Through multi-language product variant capabilities, you can create separate product descriptions in different languages for one specific product, rather than creating new product listings for each language. Additionally, you can write language-specific landing pages, marketing funnels, upsells, and checkout pages, each with unique offers.

The 29 Next platform additionally facilitates multiple payment methods, such as PayPal, Klarna, and local bank card acquiring with 3DS2 authentication, enabling merchants to offer the preferred local payment method. Providing these options to customers smooths the checkout process and reduces the rate of abandoned carts.

Global customers can shop in their local language, use their local currency, and check out with their preferred payment method while merchants save time and manpower by having an organized and unified back-end.

Fully Control Pricing in Every Market

Pricing is as much of an art as it is a science, and it may be the most critical factor in the purchasing process. When launching to a new market, most brands will spend significant time and resources on researching pricing to launch competitively.

For both online and offline retail, pricing is sensitive, and merchants must be able to control their products’ prices without restriction, regardless of where the goods are being sold.

From 29 Next’s Dashboard, merchants can set multiple locale-specific pricing schemes for the same product by creating unique stock records. Merchants therefore have full control of their pricing and can implement pricing strategies that best address a local market.

Multiple stock records for the same product simplifies management by having specific product details - including pricing, product description, stock availability, etc - for each sales market all in one place. These localized stock records can also reside in geographically separate warehouses.

In contrast, most other platforms don’t have the capability to facilitate multi-country sales from the same store, thereby forcing brands to open, manage, and pay for multiple stores. Others have indirect workarounds, such as Shopify locking full price control behind their highest-tier packages.

Make the Most Out of Your Data

With pricing and localization in multiple markets sorted, let’s talk about data management.

Say you’re a growing American company with new sales in a handful of European countries, like France, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland. Out of your five markets, you sell in four different currencies: USD, GBP, EUR, and CHF.

Problem: How do you track and analyze your sales data across two continents and four currencies?

Store managers using other platforms need to perform some combination of downloading sales data from multiple stores, finding historical exchange rates, and compiling their findings into one single place.

The 29 Next solution: just open the Reports dashboard.

29 Next automatically collects your sales data and converts it (using exchange rates at the time of transaction) into the currency of your choosing so you can track your combined sales with ease. Everything you need for sales data analysis is all found in a single backend.

Being able to easily track and manage your sales data frees up time for you to analyze them and make improvements on your sales and marketing strategies.

A Little Goes a Long Way

With the right platform features, taking your DTC business international can be a relatively smooth process. Eliminating some of the hurdles that limit brands from expanding was one of the main targets for 29 Next, and we are pleased to offer this flexibility to our clients.

Localization tools in particular can make a significant impact on your sales numbers. By dedicating time and localization, you can increase your conversion rates and build a lasting brand impression in a new market. Even a 2-5% increase in revenue can be significant for a growing brand.

So while other platforms have serviceable workarounds for these common problems, only 29 Next packages it all together in a flexible and cost-effective way.

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