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The global eCommerce industry is worth $6.8 trillion and targets 33% of the global population that shops online regularly. Any eCommerce store that wants to expand into new markets and enjoy a wider reach has plenty of opportunities to do so, provided they have access to the necessary resources and know-how.
Aside from the expertise, growing eCommerce companies must lean into their strengths to overcome internal and external challenges. Let us start by understanding the primary barriers to eCommerce growth and the growth hacks that you can use to overcome the challenges and scale performance.
Understanding the barriers that can slow down the growth of your eCommerce business is crucial when you are trying to scale. While some of these barriers can derail your operations even at a local level, most of them can be quite challenging when you are looking to expand globally.
Some of the primary barriers you should know about are:
Most websites today adopt English as the primary language.
However, some websites catering to a strictly local audience may use other languages. While having a multilingual website is an option, nothing says “local” like a store — online or offline — in the local language.
No wonder, 40% of global shoppers won’t prefer to buy from websites that are not in their local language. But this can add an additional layer of complexity for websites that are looking to expand into another country.
Ecommerce websites that offer a wide range of payment methods to customers perform better than those that offer limited options. By offering payment method diversity and support for digital wallets, eCommerce websites can broaden their target audience, but doing this is not easy. The regional regulations in specific countries can also be a major barrier to expanding your eCommerce store globally.
When you navigate cross-border deliveries regularly, logistics can quickly turn into your biggest headache. However, they can often include taxes, customs, and other additional charges that can elevate your overall logistics costs. Also, there may be many unforeseeable pain points that can disrupt your logistical workflow.
Now that we have learned about the primary barriers slowing down the global expansion of eCommerce businesses, there are several hacks and strategies to maintain and elevate your business performance. That said, here are the major growth hacks you should be leveraging for your eCommerce store:
Ecommerce websites can easily leverage AI to personalize recommendations for customers based on their shopping preferences and behavior. By using AI, eCommerce companies can tailor content, recommendations, and even offers to individual shoppers and boost conversion rates.
To get personalization right, you must balance any content generated through AI with human touch and review. So, even if you use an AI tool like ChatGPT or Perplexity to generate high-quality content, it's essential today to refine AI-generated content by an experienced editor so that it is tailored to individual users or customer segments.
Personalization can foster loyalty and repeat business among customers, and help you scale your global eCommerce performance. For instance, Amazon famously credits a big chunk of its revenue to its highly personalized recommendations.
Even for smaller stores, running personalized email campaigns and leveraging AI-powered recommendations can help turn casual shoppers into loyal customers, who can contribute more to revenue.
eCommerce companies must consider automating tasks and activities like order management, marketing efforts, and even customer communication using AI. By streamlining these routine processes, eCommerce companies can empower their workflows to send out targeted emails, flag suspicious orders, and manage inventory updates.
By accomplishing all of this without any manual intervention, you can enhance the speed and accuracy of your responses and boost customer satisfaction levels.
For example, you can reduce friction in your customer service and support processes by implementing automated chatbots that can answer customer queries instantly and be available 24/7, thus preventing abandonment.
Since localization is a major barrier to eCommerce expansion, websites offering local currency pricing, multi-language support, and culturally relevant content tend to perform better. Such websites experience significantly higher conversion rates, especially in global eCommerce operations.
By using translation plugins, customized payment gateways, and localized SEO strategies, eCommerce stores can boost their approachability and trustworthiness. These efforts can go a long way in inviting local shoppers and driving purchases and loyalty in each region.
Maintaining profitability and satisfying international customers are pivotal to establishing a seamless global logistics process. Getting through complex customs processes and shipping delays can quickly erode your profit margins and customer goodwill.
For instance, when managing sea freight or air shipments, missing out on essential shipping documents or not packaging your goods well can cause potential product or revenue loss.
Many eCommerce businesses partner with a logistics platform to automate paperwork, come up with accurate shipping quotes, and real-time shipments tracking. You can also consider setting up more fulfilment hubs in various regions to reduce delivery costs and times. You can successfully optimize your supply chain ecosystem using these ways and ensure that your customers, regardless of their location, can receive consistently fast and timely service.
Successful online stores must adopt an omnichannel approach to boost sales and multiply touchpoints. By selling products on your brand website as well as global marketplaces and social media shops, you can expand your market reach.
By meeting customers where they prefer to shop, you can enhance their buying experience and establish a unified brand presence by integrating price, data, and inventory across channels. Elevating your customer experience can also help you drive more repeat purchases and boost customer satisfaction levels.
Pro Tip: To promote your products across platforms and attract more traffic and sales from your social media profiles, leverage a bio link tool and make it easier for customers to browse and purchase your products.
When you are driving scalable eCommerce growth for your store, data is your superpower.
Online stores that successfully harness business intelligence tools and analytics can not only help you optimize pricing and identify products with high sales and margins, but also dissect customer behavior.
Consider implementing tools that can give you access to real-time performance and tracking data, which can help you create comprehensive reports and make agile decisions. What’s more, you can also optimize your spend, manage customer segmentation, and improve inventory control with the help of advanced analytics.
Scaling your eCommerce store and taking it global can often require meticulous planning and execution on your end. Creating a comprehensive checklist will help you address all the critical aspects involved in the process, minimize expensive mistakes, and maximize your growth.
Some of the key aspects you must include in your checklist are detailed and thorough market research, localization of your website, selection of the right tools for your tech stack, and more. Logistics is yet another item on that checklist, but a particularly important one, as it determines the performance of your online store.
By creating an easy-to-navigate checklist format, you can track and manage your service standards and processes while reaching new audiences globally.
Scaling eCommerce performance in a global market is quite challenging and can require you to make some smart investments. Balancing AI, localization, automation, and data analytics, you can overcome any hurdle that slows down your eCommerce store, and even put it on the trajectory for growth.
By deploying some of the growth hacks listed in this article, you can tap into new markets, optimize your eCommerce operations, and create unique shopping experiences for your customers.
