Cross-border Selling

International ecommerce opens up new markets, audiences, and revenue. Our library of cross-border selling articles includes tools and platforms, shipping tactics, localization needs (language, currency, payments), country and region analysis, import-export considerations, and more.

Cross-border Selling
Canada: Opportunity for U.S., U.K. Ecommerce Merchants?

July 9, 2015 • Marcia Kaplan

Canada is the top choice of 84 percent of U.S. merchants who sell cross-border, according to the 2014 Multichannel Merchant Outlook report. Obvious advantages are a common language (most of ...
Cross-border Selling
Ecommerce in Latin America: Challenges, Opportunities

February 26, 2015 • Marcia Kaplan

Latin America presents a paradox to ecommerce merchants. It contains a rapidly growing middle class eager for a larger selection of quality goods, but the region has unreliable shipping operations ...
Cross-border Selling
Mexico Poised for Ecommerce?

December 11, 2014 • Marcia Kaplan

With Mexico’s reputation for unrelenting poverty and crime, it’s difficult to think of the country as a good place to do business. Yet, with a population of 122.3 million and ...
Cross-border Selling
Ecommerce in Russia: Another Emerging Market?

November 12, 2014 • Marcia Kaplan

While ecommerce continues to take a larger share of overall retail sales in the United States and Western Europe, the biggest growth rates are occurring in emerging markets such as ...
Cross-border Selling
Ecommerce in India Takes Off; Potential for U.S. Sellers

July 10, 2014 • Marcia Kaplan

While China has certainly been the star of international ecommerce, India — the second most populous country in the world — is starting to show some genuine energy. Even Alibaba,
Cross-border Selling
6 Tips for Selling on Marketplaces this Holiday Season

September 5, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Marketplaces like eBay, Rakuten, and Amazon attract millions of eager shoppers during the holiday season. Online retailers, even small ones, can post products to these marketplaces and earn many additional ...
Cross-border Selling
Cross Border Ecommerce Booming

August 13, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan

As populous countries such as Brazil, China, and India develop increasingly acquisitive middle classes, opportunities for online sales to these countries are growing. Except for small mom and pop outlets, the brick and mortar retail sectors are poorly developed outside of major cities. ...
Cross-border Selling
Cross-border Ecommerce Can Reduce Closeouts, Clearance

May 17, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Seasonal or discontinued products sitting in inventory limit cash flow and may make it more difficult for merchants to invest in newer, faster-selling or higher-margin products. While many retailers discount or close out these products, there may be an opportunity to maintain higher mar...
Cross-border Selling
5 Quick Tips for Shipping Internationally

May 10, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Cross-border online sales may account for a significant portion of total ecommerce orders in just the next few years, according to some reports. But for many small online retailers the task of actually shipping a package internationally and understanding all of the associated rules, reg...
Cross-border Selling
Geolocation Helpful to Merchants, Tricky for SEO

February 3, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Identifying where an online consumer lives can be helpful to ecommerce merchants. Among visitors to an ecommerce site, there's differences in language, currency, and climate. A clothing merchant, for example, would presumably offer different items to a visitor from Alaska than from, say...
Cross-border Selling
SEO: Grow Multinational Sales With Geo-targeting “Signals”

March 18, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Driving organic search traffic and sales through multinational search engine optimization requires a fusion of keyword relevance and geo-targeting to send location relevance signals. The search engines have to decipher a site’s geo-targeting signals to deliver the right page in the righ...
Cross-border Selling
Ask an Expert: European Payment Solutions

December 30, 2009 • PEC Staff

"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question concerning European payment solutions from Rashda Ali, commercial manager, Europe, with Comvita.com, a New Zealand-based retailer of healt...
Cross-border Selling
The PeC Review: i-BEAK Offers First Rate Translation and Cultural Services

September 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio

One of the great promises of the Internet is that it brings together buyers and sellers from around the world. But, that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone can communicate. Ecommerce marketers who want to sell their products or services worldwide should therefore consider translati...
Cross-border Selling
Ecommerce Know-How: Translate Your Ecommerce Site

August 19, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Language translation is an increasingly important part of ecommerce marketing, as many small- to mid-size businesses seek non-English-speaking customers. But translating a product detail page into Spanish, French, Czech, or Chinese is, frankly, not as simple as hopping over to Google, ...
Cross-border Selling
The PeC Review: Bing’s Language Translator

July 1, 2009 • Armando Roggio

In some ways the Internet is like a giant global mall, with shoppers from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico mingling with like-minded buyers from India, Japan, and Spain. To better serve that mall, many online merchants choose to present product information, site navigation, and store polici...
Cross-border Selling
The PeC Traffic Report: Asian Survey Provides Insight Into Search Habits

March 13, 2009 • Armando Roggio

From time to time it is useful to take a look at other industries to see how they are doing business and to glean tips for boosting web traffic to your own ecommerce site. In this edition of The PeC Traffic Report we'll take a look at an interesting new survey of electrical engineers i...