International Business and Technology Blog

Are you thinking of setting up an international online store? We put together a quick test that will help you evaluate whether your products and business model are suitable for selling online internationally.

The array of products to sell online is enormous. Frankly, creating an exhaustive list of all requirements for online sales that would address every single type of product sold from and to every single market in the world is an impossible task. To keep things fun and easy, we put together a list of questions that you should ask yourself when deciding whether to sell online internationally.

Here’s the first clue: in today’s online world, set out to be found! And that changes everything: less cost, less time expended, faster recruitment (days even…), more and better quality candidates (as they span a range of access routes to market). And finally a better business relationship as the potential partners are approaching you, rather than you chasing them, so you are in the driving seat. Change your 20^th century rule book: don’t go out there using traditional “Find an Overseas Distributor” routes. Deploy today’s online technologies to be highly visible in your target markets and let those “best of” potential distributors find you. Set out to be found and identified as the company that they want to represent in your target market - their local market. Today’s 21^st century rule book is all about letting your international online presence do the heavy lifting. So throw away those “Yellow pages” and put up those “online localized pages”.

Ever attentive to the international ambitions of its members, the US National Marine Manufacturers Association (NMMA) conducted a survey in June 2016 appropriately titled “Looking to Navigate Beyond US Borders?” 84 companies responded, providing results that re-inforce what those charged with navigating those challenges know: that there are two main routes to grow exports and international business, namely that of i) international trade shows and then ii) online marketing and social media.

International trade shows, the staple route to international markets since such events commenced (in France) some 120 years ago, remains the leader with 73%. But what is interesting is the rapid uptake of online marketing and social media. Off most navigators horizons just 5 years ago, online marketing now commands the attention and budget of 65% of the respondents. And watch that number and % figure continue to rise…

Read all about it! In fact, you should watch it. It's official, video has killed the copywriting star, a one minute video has the same value as 1.8 million words. Video is destined to be the #1 medium for both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) communications. All industry metrics tell us that companies with brands to develop are investing more in videos and their platforms. Corporate videos of all nature and purpose (presentation, mission, explainer, product, testimonial…) are finding their way onto their own and/or 3^rd party websites as well as their social media channels including You Tube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, We Chat and, of course, LinkedIn. Video is the evident future powerhouse of content, replacing heavy duty and time consuming text. Roll over the guidelines from the likes of David Ogilvy’s “7 Tips for Writing Copy That Sells” and rise up the visual instructions from those at YouTube and Videolicious!

Small business exporters around the globe are amongst the biggest beneficiaries of the newly established international digital connectivity. The recent McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report entitled “Digital Globalization: the new era of global flows” quantifies this for us as “used cross-border bandwidth has grown 45 times larger since 2005. It is projected to grow by another nine times in the next five years”. That’s worth reading twice. We enjoy the huge benefits of this every day, everywhere, unnoticed. That is until it stops functioning and then we get frustrated. Across the globe, wherever we are, we demand that every office and every home, café, car, train and now airplane is connected; even walking down the street we are all phoning, texting, buying, selling or just surfing the internet on smart  phones and mobile devices. Global digital connectivity is becoming ubiquitous and is changing every aspect of how we do business, not just nationally but internationally.

This blog’s goal is to give you an overview of European domain registration requirements for selected countries.

Can a non-EU company register European domains?

Even though the EU coordinates and standardizes many processes across the member states, requirements for domain registration are still managed by each country independently and often differ considerably.  Some countries will allow you to register domains without further requirements, while others will require you to provide various local details, e.g. address or corporate tax number, in which case you’ll need the help of a local partner. Some domain registrars provide local contact details for selected countries as part of their service too.

Leading Chinese search engines

Two years ago, Baidu boasted 80% of the Chinese online search market. Today, Baidu’s market share is estimated at 55% (1). But the winner has not been the otherwise world dominant Google, but other Chinese search engines including Qihoo 360 and Sogou.

While Baidu’s dominant position among the search engines in China has eroded, Google has not been a beneficiary since it has been banned in China as of 2010. Besides censorship, ClickZ (2) cites different online search behavior as one of the factors why Baidu and other domestic search engines have been more successful in China than Google. For example: an average Chinese internet user spends 3-6 times more time on page on average, does not focus on the upper left corner of the page as their Western counterparts do, searches mostly on smartphones and prefers to choose from a list rather than by typing keywords.

United States Trade Representative (USTR) Michael Froman was relaxed, bullish and optimistic during the April 2016 State International Development Organization (SIDO) meeting, as he discussed the US ongoing trade negotiations, notably the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The plan agreed by USTR with their European Union (EU) counterparts, is to deliver TTIP by December 2016. If not, TTIP could well be booted down the road, even shelved for years! Also during the SIDO occasion, EU Ambassador to the US, David O’Sullivan, confirmed the agreed sense of urgency. Both EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström and Froman will “do what it takes”, upping the tempo of their meetings and negotiations, to get TTIP done before the end of the Obama administration. That’s the now or never plan.

Google Translate boasts 103 languages, covering 99% of the online population and processes more than 1 billion user translation requests per day. I love Google Translate because it is so easy to use and it costs nothing. I hate Google Translate because the results I get range from an approximation to complete gibberish. Great for personal use, but bad for business. Given the complexity of languages in the world (check out our translation article), those of us challenged with international communications know that quality language translation is extremely complex: it is hugely demanding of expertise and time, and so of money. As they say, “you get what you pay for”. 

The importance of owning a domain for your export markets is twofold: Firstly, to protect and own your brand, secondly to improve your local search engine optimization. In this blog, we will take a closer look at both of these aspects, give you recommendations on the increasingly popular geographical domains, and provide you with basic information on what you need to register your international domains.