This article is a part of our cross-border e-commerce series, which serves the goal of preparing you for the expansion of your business abroad.
Make sure to read the previous two articles before you continue with the cross-border e-commerce checklist:
Cross-Border E-commerce: Choosing where to sell
Cross-Border E-commerce: How to Prepare Your Store For Selling Abroad
Once you’ve chosen where to sell and know how to prepare your store for selling abroad, make sure you go through our checklist. This guide will help you navigate the expansion and make sure you don’t miss anything important when preparing to sell abroad.
Online Store Fundamentals
Here are all the website fundamentals you need to have before you start with cross-border e-commerce.
- Choose whether you will build a new language version of your website or a whole new website
- Buy a new local domain
- Create a switch countries option
- Create a switch currency option
- Work on a local welcome screen that doesn’t include automatic redirects
Translations
Make sure you have all of these translated:
- Your logo
- Text pages i.e. Terms & Conditions, Delivery, Payment, Return policy, Privacy Policy
- Product categories
- Products
- System messages and pop-ups
- Transactional mails
- Web banners
Extra tip: Translate these with someone who doesn’t just know the language but is also native to it. You can also have the translations based on top local competitors.
Currency and pricing
- Choose a base currency
- Decide whether you want to sell at your current prices or at different prices
- Decide between rounded and unrounded prices
Using an automatic conversion can cause a problem. For example, let’s say you want to sell in Romania and you use a currency conversion. Then the Romanian site will show prices such as 15.22 lei. In this case, it’s better to decide on rounded prices. Unrounded prices will be a thorn in customers’ eyes and might even set the prejudice that you are not local.
Delivery Options
- Will you choose one delivery option or more?
- Build the synchronization with the courier system of your choice
- Create mandatory address fields
- Mention the free delivery threshold
- Find a way to account for when the shipment has been delivered/paid
- Phone verification
Payment Options
Implement two or more of the following payment options:
- COD
- Bank Transfer
- vPOS
- PayPal
SEO
- New search console
- XML sitemaps for products, categories, filters
- XML sitemaps for pictures and video
- Page Speed Test
- Hreflang tags
To sum up
If you’ve done your research right and you take care of each cross-border e-commerce checklist component mentioned above, then your business expansion is set for success. Just make sure you avoid some of these common mistakes:
- Failing to understand your target audience and defining it wrong
- Poor website design
- Bad SEO
- Complicated checkout process
- Poor customer service
These are the five areas you need to invest most in if you want to succeed in selling abroad. Let us know if our series of cross-border e-commerce articles have helped you with your future endeavours.
