Where Should I Expand My Ecommerce Offering?

When looking at how you can expedite your ecommerce growth you can usually break it down into three areas:

1. Expanding your product offering depth (new brands, more product styles)
2. Expanding into new product categories
3. Expanding into new markets

All of these aim at opening your pool of potential customers to in turn fuel that growth.

Now it’s that last one, internationalisation, that I wanted to drill into with this blog post.

Setting yourself up to be able to target more markets is not a simple task. Each market with have:

• Different popular payments methods
• Different delivery and logistic options
• Different paths to purchase
• Different competitive landscapes
• Different legal considerations
• Different languages

That’s just the tip of the iceberg too - the list goes on and on!

As you can probably tell, it’s not just about copying and pasting what you’re doing now, waving your magic wand and expecting success. It’s therefore important to be strategic before even beginning to start taking those research steps.

Because - *shock horror* - the world’s a big place and there are a lot of new market opportunities out there.

The question becomes: how can you begin to identify the biggest international opportunities available to you?

A couple of quick examples of how you could do this without diving into too much detail would be:

1. Investigating any international traffic you are already getting

This showcases an already available demand and is particularly relevant if you have an overseas delivery offering from your existing main market’s site

2. Using external tools to see the scope of size compared to existing opportunities, for example a few of those tools could be:

• Market Finder
• Market Explorer
• Similar Web
• and to some extent even Google Trends

This is geared towards finding untapped potential by looking at the verticals you operate in across all markets. Finding markets with low competition, but high search volume for your key product categories - complemented with economic factors such as GDP per capita - could help you find some high-potential markets to investigate further.

Once you’ve shortlisted the seemingly best and biggest opportunities available - that’s when the real work begins.

You can start to investigate:

• A more detailed and fuller view of the opportunity available
• The costs and challenges that you’ll need to overcome to facilitate this
• And much much more

As you begin to paint the picture you can begin to understand if it’s the right time for you to begin your expansion activity.

And it’s important to not to do this alone.

Learn from the successes and mistakes of others - you won't be the first company to expand into that market - and give yourselves the best chance of success by networking and partnering well.

1. Spot and assess opportunities
2. Execute successfully
3. Grow & cultivate

The three steps to international success!

At Genie Goals we’ve helped countless clients expand their digital marketing activities into new markets. If you’re interested in finding out more about how we can support you, get in touch at hello@geniegoals.co.uk 

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