International Business and Technology Blog

Tereza Santava

Recent Posts

Exporting to Germany: Online payment methods

Posted by Tereza Santava on Mon, Feb 08, 2016

Our blog How to sell online in Germany introduced the attractiveness of the German ecommerce market and outlined the main expectations of German e-shoppers, including payment methods, delivery, returns, mobility, personalization and terms & policies. Today, we will have a closer look at the theme of German online payment methods.

According to the German E-Commerce and Distance Selling Trade Association (bevh) study, the most popular online payment method preferred by 39% of German e-shoppers are online payment services. Besides the international platform PayPal there are many local online payment service providers such as Sofortüberweisung.de, ClickandBuy and Giropay that are well known and have a significant market share of the online payment services.

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Tags: All posts, Global Markets, Global Ecommerce

10 CMS requirements for building multilingual websites

Posted by Tereza Santava on Tue, Oct 06, 2015

Content Management Systems (CMS) are not our fellow human beings, they are just online tools for building and editing websites. So why do so many of us feel so passionate about them? If you discover a new CMS feature that will simplify your work, you love your CMS. But if it doesn’t work as you instructed and the editor displays a mess instead, you hate your CMS. The relationship gets sometimes complicated. But whatever that is, today’s question that we will answer is: What should you require from your CMS when building multilingual websites?

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Tags: All posts, Website Localization, Global Markets

How to sell online in Germany

Posted by Tereza Santava on Tue, Sep 01, 2015

In 2014, Germany boasted over 51 million online consumers, only superseded by China, Japan and the USA. In terms of e-commerce, Germany comes 2nd in Europe after the UK, with over 41 Bn annual online sales, as reported by the German E-Commerce and Distance Selling Trade Association.

E-commerce sector represented 9% of Germany’s total retail industry in 2014. The German E-Commerce and Distance Selling Trade Association forecasted a 12% growth in 2015, reaching a revenue of nearly 47 Bn. Other sources predict even higher growth rates, between 20-30%. According to the Association of the German Internet Industry, more than half (53%) of German GDP generated in 2017 will be e-commerce related (compared to 37% in 2012).

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Tags: All posts, Global Markets, Global Ecommerce

USA & UK: Do you need a dedicated website for your English-speaking market across the Atlantic?

Posted by Tereza Santava on Wed, Jul 29, 2015

The UK and the USA are among each other’s top export markets.The USA is the largest single destination for British exports, and the UK is America’s largest export market in the EU (#5 overall). UK <=> US trade alone equals $214 billion a year. 

Many of our clients with an American/British English website ask whether it’s really necessary to build a country specific website for the UK/US markets given the language similarity. Ideally - yes, you should build a country specific website for each of your geographical markets, but it is of a lesser urgency than building a website for let’s say a German/French market that speaks a completely different language.

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Tags: All posts, Global Markets

Export Accelerator by Google & Ingenico – facilitating cross-border ecommerce

Posted by Tereza Santava on Tue, Jun 23, 2015

Online giant Google and a leader in seamless payment Ingenico teamed up to facilitate cross-border ecommerce. The project Export Accelerator aims to help online merchants boost their business abroad by reducing cross-border obstacles.

Export Accelerator will pilot in Belgium and will address a key challenge businesses face when expanding abroad. The solution should provide companies with an opportunity to explore and identify new growth opportunities, penetrate international markets and increase online revenue.

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Tags: All posts, Global Ecommerce

Facilitating ecommerce in Europe: Digital Single Market

Posted by Tereza Santava on Thu, May 28, 2015

Many EU standards and policies that facilitate business and trade have been developed over the past years. However, the EU is yet to become a truly single market. Local small-medium sized companies face barriers when selling online, so do US exporters. Europe must embrace the digital revolution and open up digital opportunities for people and businesses. The European Commission believes that using the power of the EU's Digital Single Market will allow Europe to achieve this goal. This May, the European Commission introduced its detailed plans to create a Digital Single Market with the objective to combat its current online barriers in order to boost EU-wide cross-country e-commerce. This will help start-ups and small-medium sized companies to fully benefit from growth opportunities of the EU market. Subsequently, this will also allow US companies export more easily across the EU from a single central location. Country-specific regulation has been identified as the greatest barrier to a single, fully functional e-commerce market.  

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Tags: All posts, Global Markets, Global Ecommerce

Get return on investment from your website by generating new leads

Posted by Tereza Santava on Wed, May 27, 2015

Clients often ask us “What is a typical return on investment in country specific websites?” While the benefits of international online presence and online marketing are enormous, there is nothing like a “typical” return on investment. It all depends on how you define the return and what investment you make.

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Tags: All posts, Website Localization

Watch out for bad grammar in European search trends!

Posted by Tereza Santava on Fri, Apr 17, 2015

If you want to be visible in your target export market online, you need to optimize your website for local search engines, such as google.de in Germany or google.fr in France. You might laugh that we call this global search engine giant local, but that is indeed the truth. Over 90% of searches in most European countries come from local Googles that show different search results. Remember, you cannot simply translate a well performing US keyword to Spanish or Dutch and expect to see the same results. Search trends, including keywords popularity and difficulty to rank, vary among markets.

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Tags: All posts, Global Markets, International Online Marketing

April will mix up mobile search results as Google introduces a new ranking factor

Posted by Tereza Santava on Mon, Mar 23, 2015

It was predicted that 2014 would have been a milestone, when the number of Google searches carried out on mobile devices would surpass that of PCs. Although Google remains secretive about the exact proportion of mobile versus desktop search, it is estimated that half of searches do indeed come from smartphones and tablets.

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Tags: All posts, International Online Marketing

Making your website user-friendly II: DIY usability testing for companies

Posted by Tereza Santava on Thu, Jan 22, 2015

In our December blog Making your website user-friendly: DIY requirements identification for companies we introduced a check list for companies on how to identify user requirements, including 1) Persona definition 2) Scenarios and story-boarding and 3) Requirements definition. The aim of these two blogs is to advice business owners, sales and marketing managers and IT managers on how to create user-friendly websites that generate business using techniques that are not resource-intensive. Today we have a closer look at usability testing.

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Tags: All posts, Website Localization