The Myth-Busters Handbook: Five Myths that Slow Down Sales and How to Avoid Them

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There are some great services, with qualified translators, that know both ecommerce and marketplaces. Customer service can be outsourced successfully too. If your international order volume gets so high that it would be cheaper to provide native-language support in-house, then that would be a good problem to have! There are a couple of reasons that your results might be very different today.

Hidden Dangers

Firstly, the markets have changed a lot over the course of the last few years. Many more markets, buyers and product categories have opened up to buying internationally. You could try exactly the same strategy that failed a few years ago, and get a completely different result. What is a more active strategy? Translate fully, create local listings, understand the market and invest in building your sales. Consider using local fulfillment and native-language customer support. If you have a large catalog with thousands of SKUs, research the market then pick a small subset of your products to reduce the cost and risk of this strategy.

If you made just a few sales in a country where you had long delivery times, high shipping charges, and poor translation, how much better could you do if you fix those things? A refund or return is never a welcome occurrence for a seller. Returns often result from the buyer changing their mind, but equally often they can highlight a quality issue which is within your power to address.

Analyzing returns to see where processes could be improved becomes even more important when you are selling internationally. Returns can provide really helpful evidence of a failure in your own operations:. But there are other options. You could use a local company to receive returns on your behalf. Service providers like ZigZag Global and Intercultural Elements will receive your goods at a local warehouse, then consolidate them with other returns so they can be shipped back to you at a much lower rate.

ZigZag can also resell returns on the local market, so you get some cash back fairly quickly without having to ship the return internationally or spend your own time processing it. But having it as your only tactic is costly and unnecessary — there are other options to play with. A lot of customers will forget or not even notice that they are buying from a seller abroad. Those situations can cause big customer service headaches, and get you into hot water with the marketplaces if the complaint comes back to them.

Myth #2: You need foreign-language speakers on your staff

First, be aware of the circumstances when local taxes really do become your problem. There are various VAT thresholds within Europe, for example, and if your sales go above them then you have to register. If you are selling to the U. Second, if you regularly get complaints that orders have been delayed or subjected to customs fees, consider scaling back to products which attract fewer complaints — or even completely suspending sales to the countries where the problem is worst.

Another solution is to look into DDP delivery duty paid shipping services which means you pay customs fees and taxes in advance, so the buyer receives their order more quickly and without charges. It seems so logical. In cases like this, I recommend that sellers look a little deeper into their sales numbers. So next, in this example, they should look at how they are selling to Mexico. If their listings are in English, and shipping is expensive and slow for Mexican buyers, that actually presents a big opportunity to grow.

How much more could they sell if they actually made an effort to appeal to Mexican customers? If sales pick up even more, they can start thinking about Amazon FBA or another local fulfillment provider to get their stock onto Mexican soil in advance. Passive selling has so many constraints and tipping points that even small numbers can be good indicators of potential growth.

The Best Books For Non-Profits and Fundraising Success

Not all translations are equal. Machine translation like Google Translate is an amazing technology, but certainly not an alternative to human translation. Even experienced human translators, while they should provide linguistically correct descriptions, might create completely inaccurate listings if they are not familiar with how people buy the type of products you sell, in the local market where you intend to sell them.

Properly localized translations by an ecommerce specialist can make all the difference. It stayed like that for a few months until they started to get some customer service queries which made them realize something was wrong. Someone with local knowledge would have known that and helped them be much more targeted, leaving certain keywords in English or having them in both languages. Sales picked up once it was fixed.

MythBusters Results - List of Myths and Summaries

Sizing is a huge issue, especially for bigger brands. Clothes sizes vary a huge amount between countries, even when the scale used appears to be the same. Sizing also varies a lot between brands, so each brand can have different size mapping requirements between countries, genders, garment types and so on. Some country size maps overlap or completely omit certain values, which makes a mess of variation listings if you miss out sizes or try to map two to the same size.

You would certainly want input from someone who understands the country on a deeper level than just being able to make a literal translation. The best solution to address most sizing issues is to have a very detailed size chart. You can have a customized size chart on Amazon if you contact Seller Central, and obviously you can have your own size chart on your eBay listings. The flaw is this: Several countries have the same currency, but Europe is still a collection of many different independent countries.

So start thinking along one of two strategic lines: What marketplaces are available? What are the regional requirements?

How competitive will you be in that particular country? Or, should you tackle it by marketplace?

Rather than trying to list all products into all marketplaces for one country, list all your product on Amazon France, Germany and Italy as a start. Either plan by country, or plan by marketplace. Both approaches can be successful. Aiming to sell on all Amazon EU marketplaces, as a starting point, would still be a challenge but safer than aiming to sell to all European marketplaces and countries. A lot of sellers, when they start selling across borders, will use their existing domestic parcel carrier to ship international orders.

Local carriers rarely have the best service for shipping internationally, either they are too expensive or the service will be too poor. There are companies out there that specialize in international shipping such as wnDirect UK and Asendia global. They can offer a better balance, with reasonably good rates, service levels and tracking abilities. They still use local carriers in the destination country, so there can be glitches in areas such as tracking.

You will often find that you can get a better service by looking beyond your normal domestic carrier. Plus it's even tougher when your "prospects" turn out to be DOA - dead on arrival. They don't really have the money. They don't really love your mission. Or they just don't like you, personally. As all good fundraising managers know, raising money requires heavy-duty attention to ROI — return on investment. Today's blog is a guest post from our official partners at DonorSearch, the experts in prospect research.

This is the fourth in our series on fundraising management.

Myth #1: You need a “big plan” to sell internationally

This is the third article in our series on fundraising management. This is one of the three majorduties of management. What's missing in Moves Management? This is the first in a series of posts on the question of fundraising management, an issue I believe will revolutionize fundraising as we know it; as long as we understand and adopt the concept. What's the Deal with Development Audits? Why conduct a development audit? What is it anyway? Development audits are in-depth analyses of what's happening in your fundraising shop - and what some people in the organization think is happening or not.

Opinions about such audits run the gamut from hate, fear and distrust to enthusiasm and delight at insights gained. We recently launched our new SMART Way Development Audit, and tailored it to respond to both the "delight" party and the "hate, fear and distrust" par. Yahoo, it's the end of the year!

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