International Marketplace Integrated with Your ERP-CRM

INTERNATIONAL MARKETING TO EXPAND YOUR CLIENT BASE

Working with International Marketplace Nuances

International markets increasingly favor specialty platforms for B2B eCommerce sales. Companies can design their own international marketplace platforms or sell on multiple platforms to extend their marketing reach. These methods offer valuable opportunities to increase sales, improve international marketing methods, and generate leads and commission.

However, a large part of success stems from how well your business handles the challenges of world wide marketplaces. Successful companies adjust their marketing techniques for audiences of varying interests, nationalities, and purchasing habits.

It’s critical to manage complex inventory issues, international marketing strategies, multiple languages, web store connectors, and other automatic processes. Having workflows for these processes that allow operations to run smoothly will generate customer loyalty, build trust, and facilitate conversions.

International Marketplace Strategies

It’s advantageous to work with your vendors and enable them to keep their own warehouses and shipping providers. This reduces your costs of storing, shipping, and manufacturing products.
Focusing on a niche market will allow your business to dominate that niche and expand from there.
Marketplace platforms provide multiple product lines and services on one website, but can also have subdomains, or be a multistore platform.
Multistore platforms can tailor content to different customers, and are especially useful for operating in international marketplaces.

Jump to Marketplace FAQs

Why You Need an International eCommerce Platform

Best Practices for Building a World-Wide Marketplace

Strategic infrastructure is one of most important criterion for successfully building an international marketplace platform. It’s not as simple as allowing others to display products on the company’s website or offering to ship products internationally. There are language and cultural barriers, tax codes and compliance issues, possible price wars on marketplace platforms among vendors, and other issues.

To manage these issues and take your international eCommerce business to the next level, you need a customizable marketplace eCommerce platform that caters to your needs. A SaaS-based, off-the-shelf eCommerce product will often not be enough to get the job done, especially as the business scales. Here are some pro tips for successfully building and managing the best international marketplace solution:

Multilingual Support

Maintaining customer engagement is a top priority for creating better customer experiences and interaction with your platform. Multilanguage support is critical for this in an international marketplace. For best results, your software infrastructure has to support and manage this feature seamlessly. Website content, including articles and blogs, white papers, product descriptions, instructions, image labels, icons, and more, need to comply with local languages and presentation styles to engage customers. Simply translating existing copy isn’t enough; it’s vital to create appealing copy based on local tastes, social media trends, and content requirements of the targeted buyer profile. This is made possible through a multilingual integrate online store or multilingual eCommerce integration.

Multicurrency Shopping Carts

Customers want to pay in their own currency without needing to make complex conversion calculations. That’s why using a multi-currency integrated eCommerce solution is so important. It enables companies to include a multicurrency module to integrate live exchange rates, automatic displays of price in the appropriate currency, and real-time updates that display the right price at all times. It's difficult for users to view your product in another currency. Instead of making a decision on the size or color, they're trying to figure out if it's a good deal and converting the price in their head. You've always heard that you should "Remove all barriers of entry" if you want to increase conversions? Well, currency conversions are a barrier and there's no reason that you can't remove that barrier.

Local Competition

It’s critical to offer customers something more than a better price to convince those in foreign jurisdictions to buy products when acceptable local products are available. Your website infrastructure needs to provide a superior experience for researching products, finding specialty items, and providing shipping options with a seamless self-service ordering process. With international marketing, it’s vital to research each aspect of marketing and providing products to different jurisdictions, including whether to use local suppliers and how to adapt products for local preferences.

Multiple Payment Options

An international marketplace platform should include several payment methods through the use of a multicurrency eCommerce integration, but it’s just as critical to research each country and choose the most popular payment methods and providers to support. One payment provider study determined that choosing a popular local provider can increase conversions by 10 percent [3]. Partnering with a payment-gateway company with multiple connections increases the options for rerouting payments through multiple gateways. Clarity’s Payment Hub solution gives international marketplaces an edge because it breaks through the limitations of other payment gateway and point of sale systems. You can read more about that here, in our Point of Sales Solution with MagTek blog post.

Region-Specific Content

There are multiple options for providing region-specific content when the company’s platform has a robust API layer and integrated software. Possible approaches include designing several proprietary designs for each store. Designers can add banners to target buyers from key areas, and displays can be adjusted for the images, text, and layouts that cater to those buyers’ specific expectations and needs. Even the placement of text and images, etc., on the page can be adjusted from left to right or right to left, depending on the reading direction of buyers’ languages.

Adding Foreign Domains

The best proactive strategy for protecting sales and key terms used in website searches is registering international domains. It’s important to register popular, top-level domains such as those using “.com” and other locations. Country-specific domains, such as co.uk, .fr, and .ca also provide a better eCommerce solution for SEO ranking and optimization of keywords for each locale.

Regulatory Issues

Regulatory requirements are constantly evolving, and international marketplaces have to keep on top of them to avoid compliance issues. That’s why automated monitoring and real-time updates are so important when operating a world wide marketplace platform. For example, it might be required that each customer reads policy information, or compliance issues could be more challenging such as meeting HIPAA guidelines for health-monitoring products.

Creating a World-Class Marketplace Operation

Whether your company sells on multiple marketplace channels and/or designs an international marketplace platform where other vendors sell industry-specific goods, it’s important to partner with seasoned experts who can develop and integrate software solutions that are customized for your business. The complex challenges of the international eCommerce marketplace include the following.

Choosing Your Partner

In today’s competitive eCommerce international marketplaces, it’s important to develop, upgrade, and integrate your software continuously. New decisions are constantly needed, and ongoing monitoring and adjusting comes with the territory. That’s why you need a team of experienced platform engineers who can collaborate effectively with you to ensure platform security, consistency, scalability, and maintainability. Cultivate a long-term relationship with a platform vendor you can trust to build and manage your international marketplace platform while minimizing costs and optimizing sales and marketing.

Marketplace FAQs

How do you build a successful marketplace?

Strategic infrastructure (selecting the right platform and hosting infrastructure) ranks as the single most important criterion in successfully building an international marketplace platform. It’s not as simple as allowing others to display products on the company’s website or offering to ship products internationally. There are language and cultural barriers, tax codes and compliance issues, possible price wars on marketplace platforms among vendors, and other issues.

What is the best online marketplace?

There are a lot of big and successful marketplaces. Alibaba.com, eBay.com, Amazon.com, goAfrica.com, Etsy.com, and Craigslist.com are just a few of the most popular. There are very few platforms that can scale to what’s needed for an implementation like those. Clarity eCommerce is used for goAfrica.com, and we have clients with well over 1 million SKUs in their marketplace. Many of the ones listed above aren’t a “purchased platform” but a custom-built, in-house platform that cost them well over $10 million to build. They’ve even written books about how they architected and built their platforms. Clarity has launched marketplaces for their clients for $50k to $500k; much cheaper than building your own marketplace.

What is marketplace business model?

Marketplace business model is often referred to as C2C or consumer to consumer, B2C or business to consumer, B2B or business to business, or D2C or direct to consumer. eBay was mostly C2C, but then many businesses started selling on eBay as well, so it’s now B2C as well as C2C. Craigslist and Etsy are really the only mainly C2C marketplaces left, while businesses have all jumped into the marketplaces now. The model allows sellers to upload and sell their own products to consumers through the marketplace platform. This allows them to get their products in front of many potential consumers, and usually means giving up a percent of each transaction for the privilege of both exposure and using the marketplace platform.

What are the most important things for an international marketplace?

For an international marketplace, making sure the platform or website has the necessary capabilities is essential. Without the ability to customize marketing and presentation styles for different customers, your audience won’t be engaged in your marketplace platform. If you don’t have multilingual and multicurrency software, then your customer base will remain limited. There are many facets to consider for an international marketplace, so it’s best to work with an experienced partner for developing your platform.

International Marketplace Integrated with Your ERP-CRM