With the omnipresence of internet and the advent of cloud technologies, many retail businesses are contemplating global expansion. Growing internationally opens new revenue streams and fulfills the ambition of becoming a global brand. But expanding from a local e-commerce company to an international level involves introducing major changes to all organizational processes – from customer service to backend.
Below is a checklist of things to take care of before hitting international markets.
1) Research
Accepting a global challenge is a risky endeavor since you have to take regional differences into account. Here’s when mоdern AI-based technologies come into play. Gone are the days when marketers relied solely on intuition, natural language processing (NLP) is capable of carrying out sentiment analysis: estimating how customers feel about your brand to help you adjust marketing plans and achieve better targeting. Also known as opinion mining, this technology analyzes news and blogs assigning a negative, positive or neutral value to a text.
NLP enables you to search for brand influencers in a certain location and indicate key advocates for your brand. Today’s NLP algorithms go as far as identifying emotions: happy, annoyed, angry, sad. With precise tools like this, you now have all it takes to develop actionable strategies and make informed decisions prior to launching new initiatives.
By analyzing digital footprint like social media postings, emails, search keywords, and browsing behavior NLP helps indicate new audiences potentially interested in your products. Via simple keyword matching routine, NLP software helps broaden the range of channels for ad placement, helping you spend your ad budgets more effectively and target potential clients throughout the world.
2) Logistics
Next thing you have to take care of is making your products available for international markets: accepting various forms of payment, seamless shipping with easy exchanges and returns, etc. All in all, customers have to feel they can trust your company and have a great shopping experience, even though it’s not located in their country of residence. Compliance to local laws, taxes, and regulations is another thing you have to take care of before expanding into a certain country. The spread of internet trade has given rise to so many regulative acts (for, example, GDPR law in EU) a whole new industry called regtech aimed at development software-based tools that verify compliance to regulations has emerged and is currently gaining momentum.
Expanding internationally means you are likely to collaborate with numerous shippers on an everyday basis and make decisions as to which shipper will handle a certain order on the spot. This is easily achieved when your backend order, inventory, payment, and accounting databases are in perfect sync. RPA-based backend operations ensure all orders are processed immediately and automatically directed to a particular shipping company.
Further, boost the level of customer trust by introducing the order tracking feature. All in all, international customers will feel more confident if their order is in good hands and feel better about your brand, if you grant them this option.
3) Website
Also, your website has to be ready to welcome international customers. Update it to include multiple language versions. Consider launching NLP-based chatbots which use neural machine translation: the new AI facet that has now evolved to the point when machines can easily translate a simple, low-impact text. Emerging tech is offering a plethora of solutions for instant localization and translation, it is now easy to show an international audience you are ready to cater to them.
Getting ready to deal with increased traffic, especially during sales peaks, may involve moving to a new hosting, changing your cloud service provider and choosing a new e-commerce platform. If you still don’t have a good mobile version of your website, start building one. Researches shows, customers across the world increasingly use smartphones to browse products and exchange opinions. As much as 86 million shoppers use smartphones to make purchases online in the US alone, according to comScore. This means mobile shopping accounts for a larger number of purchases than desktop computers. With the advent of AR, the impact of mobile devices will be even more evident, so the importance of mobile-driven marketing cannot be overlooked.
Bottom line: with AI and nascent technologies going global is easier than ever for e-commerce companies. Still, the development of AI-based tools and further, their application, requires careful evaluation and assessment. If you are contemplating expanding your business internationally, evaluate your needs, set your priorities and forge partnerships with reliable AI outsourcing providers to propel your business goals.