In your business life, sooner or later you get to the point when you need to go beyond the comfort zone and upscale.
New customer segments, new product categories, new added services seem all good places to go.
And to most businesses, expanding to new territories abroad looks like the nirvana of selling to more people, more frequently, at higher prices.
But the way you start your journey can be the difference between “make it” and “break it”.
Kickstarting your deliveries abroad may seem like finding the needle in the haystack. There are so many opportunities and it is so difficult to know which is the best for you.
Take advantage of online resources to access valuable information on where to find potential customers, their disposable income, market maturity and complexity.
Getting to the customers you never see sometimes is difficult, even if the internet has reduced distances and cultural differences.
You need to decide what language to use when you talk to them in your online shop. You need to know when you can grab their attention, where to advertise, in what places or on what devices.
You can use online platforms and advertisers to make it simple for you, providing in-depth data and customer insights, with suggestions for best suited tools to tell about your product to the right person, in the best moment and place.
Start with your hero products, test the market and then expand. This way, you keep your effort and upfront investment under control and give yourself room to learn from mistakes and adapt.
Most important, make sure you put in place the best supply-chain infrastructure to deliver each type of product with the well deserved attention.
No product is the same and each one deserves to reach the customer safely and on time, always striving to beat the customers’ expectations.
Transparency is key to start new friendships and win trust. In your online product catalog, provide full details. In your shopping cart, provide clear costs, including delivery and insurance before order closure.
Give customers the possibility to choose the time of delivery, best suited to their schedules or habits. Ensure complete visibility of all delivery stages and intermediate timings.
And most of it, make sure that you take into consideration local specificities that may interfere with the order capturing and processing, like payment conditions, local holidays, traffic limitations and more.
On average, each missed order equals 6 new orders which will never come from that respective customer because of, well, trust and competition one click away.
This is why you need to make sure that your IT systems and internal processes are ready to cope with order numbers bigger than before.
Your website, shopping cart, warehouse management system, order management system, your e-fulfillers and transport providers need to work together as one team and handover fast each order, with no hiccup and fuss.
Flowers are not laptops, nor washing machines are t-shirts. Each product has its own needs in transit, depending on size, value, fragility, or weight.
This is why you have to make sure you choose the right delivery option for each and every parcel, also taking into consideration other criteria such as urgency, cost, destination, local limitations, couriers capacity to deliver your products and performance.
Make sure you have customer feedback forms and rating mechanisms, as your customers are among those who can help you grow your business fast.
Listen to what they say, learn, improve and repeat. Or change everything and start again from scratch, when the customer says so.
By now, you probably asked yourself why the title was mentioning only 3 simple steps, while the counter got to 7 already.
Well, the truth is that selling cross-the-border is quite complex, with many bumps on the road. Unless you have the right partners along the way. Just like Postis.
With us, the steps from 3 to 7 are all optional for you, and can be replace with step 3 Call Postis.
We take complexities off your shoulders and provide market best practices, tested in an integrated ecosystem of retailers, e-fulfillers, warehouse operators, transporters, couriers and logistics integrators.
