Multi-channel, cross-border sellers, I need your help

[sdob]

I'm looking to talk to e-commerce sellers with multi-channel and/or cross-border approaches.

A few months ago, we started building a platform to make life easier for international and cross-channel sellers. Obviously, there are many ways of doing things, and I'm hoping some of you want to share your experiences with international shipping, multi-channel, etc.

Some context: We converted a classic small-scale B2B manufacturer to a proper multi-channel, cross-border seller a few years ago. We wanted to sell worldwide, using local languages, currencies, etc. Our clients were B2B and B2C. At the time, we couldn't find any software tools that would allow us to follow this path, so I created my own, selling pretty much worldwide, in 8 different languages, etc. All this without any noticeable overhead in time and finance.

How are you experiencing it? Are you trading worldwide? Do you use a local website? Why not? Why yes? Where does your time go? Etc.

Would love to hear about the problems or challenges you face. Maybe even the things you've come to accept but shouldn't be so.

Thank you!
Sascha

 

[NickZ]

Usually you start regional, then national and then you go global.

98% of all different attempts fail as they do not consider the cost to go global or even to make people of neighboring countries buy from them.

Look at amazon how they grew, eBay and don't listen to that social media garbage of the easiness to conquer the world like Shein or Temu.

Are you aware what kind of money is invested there? Their approach is highly professional.

 

[fisicx]

@NickZ - if you read their post they say they are already selling worldwide.

 

[sdob]

Usually you start regional, then national and then you go global.

98% of all different attempts fail as they do not consider the cost to go global or even to make people of neighboring countries buy from them.

Look at amazon how they grew, eBay and don't listen to that social media garbage of the easiness to conquer the world like Shein or Temu.

Are you aware what kind of money is invested there? Their approach is highly professional.

@NickZ so the manufacturing business was my own. And truthfully, if you would need to start adding various markets manually, one would indeed be playing a loosing game. That's why I ended up creating the tools to do this efficiently.

In my experience, it's not rocket science. Just like with anything ecommerce, look for the right products, build the brand and push outside of country boundaries. Competition levels in non-English speaking countries are usually faaaar lower. So you end up with slightly higher shipping costs - but fair lower advertising costs.

The set of tools we created is what I'm currently re-building in a commercial setting.
That's why I'm curious for personal experiences, from people running/managing a multitude of websites. Like where is the knowledge lacking, what is taking a lot of time? Why are you, or are not exporting, etc.

 

[NickZ]

The set of tools we created is what I'm currently re-building in a commercial setting.
That's why I'm curious for personal experiences, from people running/managing a multitude of websites. Like where is the knowledge lacking, what is taking a lot of time? Why are you, or are not exporting, etc.

Well I would not merge or destroy one site in order to prep it and make it ready to aim for more.
Site one leave it like it is, build a second site aiming for the reach you wish to archive. Adding is better than modding the 1st shop.