Want to scale your ecomm store abroad?
But you’re worried about investing a lot of money only to see unsatisfactory results?
No worries—those concerns are completely normal. Scaling a business internationally isn’t easy. But don’t stress; since I’ve helped various tech businesses expand abroad, I can share some insights with you.
Here are three things you’ll definitely encounter and need to address:
1/ Adapting your store to the foreign market
2/ Enabling support for different payment methods
3/ Managing currency
Expanding internationally—assuming you’re an e-commerce business selling physical products—might involve other elements (like logistics, warehousing, etc.), but these three challenges are universal, and you can expect them 100%.
1/ Adapting your store
This isn’t just about translating your offer into another language. It means localization. Localization involves tailoring your content to the needs of a specific country or region. You need to consider the purpose behind each piece of content, which often requires tweaking the original material. This leads to a simple conclusion: the process demands knowledge of the target market and local culture—those nuances that simple translation won’t capture.
In addition to localization, there are changes driven by local regulations and standards. For instance, terms and conditions, privacy policies, product labeling, and return policies may need adjustments to comply with local laws.
2/ Payments
Your current payment provider might be able to process transactions in another country. But they might not—or might not do it well enough to meet your expectations (and in my experience, this is usually the case). You’ll need to find a payment provider or gateway that handles transactions better in your target market.
Plus, you’ll need to adapt your processes to support local payment methods popular in that region. Along with this, you might face challenges like increased chargebacks, lower acceptance rates, delayed payouts, etc. Nothing too scary, but it’s worth preparing for.
3/ Currency
This one’s obvious, but surprisingly many people overlook it. Once you start accepting payments in a foreign currency, you’ll face currency risk. Someone has to handle currency conversion. It could be the payment gateway, your bank, or even you—but someone has to do it. And it’s worth structuring it in a way that either earns you money or minimizes your losses as much as possible.
Again, nothing too daunting, but it’s something to plan carefully right from the start.
Other challenges?
Yes, there are others, but they’re often more specific and vary from case to case. For now, let’s focus on these most universal ones. If you address them well, many of your problems will already be solved.
And if scaling keeps you up at night or you need help to do it right, feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to help.
