How to get started selling Internationally
If you're trying to grow your business and expand into foreign markets there are a few ways you can, without breaking the bank.
Using a 3rd party fulfillment (3PL) service to ship internationally can drastically cut down your shipping costs making it fairly inexpensive to work with a 3PL.
Drop ship internationally and use a drop ship vendor to help you. Finding a drop ship vendor that ships internationally allows you to start selling over seas immediately. Another option would be to find a drop ship vendor over seas. Keep in mind, in order do to this your products have to be allowed by the drop ship foreign vendor.
A third option is to sell your product on your website allowing your international customers to buy directly from your site. Make sure you have an understanding on who your customers are, the duty and shipping options/restrictions before you begin.
Offer international currencies: If you support international currencies on your site, it increases your chances of selling overseas much greater than if you did not. You can manually create prices in different currencies and, depending on the end user’s country, show prices in the associated currency. You could also integrate with currency exchange rate sites like Xe.com to display prices in local currencies based on the current exchange rate.
It is also important to make changes to support local address formats, date formats, and cultural variations. Localization involves setting up country-specific domains for your business as it improves the search engine ranking in that country. Localizing your site based on your customers country and language, offers a better experience and can be done using a translation vendor.
One or more of these options can help you begin selling internationally as a retailer. Identify your larger target markets, know your product offering, determine a budget, and then pick the options that will work for your business.
Contact Port City Fulfillment for information on our services and how we can handle all of your fulfillment and shipping needs. We have a centralized location and can provide you with a quote so you can see the big cost savings for yourself.