International Business and Technology Blog

Selling your products online is no longer a negotiable, it’s a must for every company that wants to continue to grow sales and reach new, untapped audiences. Yet, the struggle for many businesses is how to remain authentic to your brand and build a personalised experience for your customers online.

Businesses today are struggling to recreate that human touch that shoppers in physical stores have always loved and connected with. The solution is to humanize the online shopping experience, which means putting the interests and needs of their customers as the top priority and enhancing the customer’s personal experience with your brand.

The key to achieving this is video!

When you don't speak the language or know the local culture of your target customers, selling to them can be challenging. Reaching customers in foreign markets requires a thorough digital and cultural understanding of the market and that is why Florida-based EnviroKlenz turned to IBT Online to help them launch their brand in Europe and leverage the EU market to their advantage.

Thanks to the Florida Online Global Programs, EnviroKlenz is now equipped with two fully localized, best-practice international and ecommerce enabled websites. Now consumers throughout Europe can find EnviroKlenz’s products easily, learn about their air purifiers and purchase directly from the website.

Read more to learn about the comprehensive strategy that IBT Online implemented to ensure a friction-less customer experience for the local buyer and therefore boost EnviroKlenz's sales as well as credibility throughout Europe. Start your ecommerce journey now!

Watch this video of Leticia Menzzano, Marketing and Brand Specialist at EnviroKlenz discussing the ongoing brand and business growth thanks to the new localized websites all delivered thanks to the Florida Online Global Programs. As Menzzano states: "The IBT Online team helped us, and we see them as a long-term partner. They took the time to understand our long-term goals and gave us solutions to get there." 

Vapor Pin Enterprises, Inc. patented the Vapor Pin®, which allows environmental professionals a means of collecting high-quality, low-cost soil gas samples within minutes. Vapor Pin was seeking to grow their brand internationally and identified as their first target market. Vapor Pin recognized that website localization can give your business a competitive advantage, helping your brand stand out in a crowded digital landscape. This task can also appear daunting to many companies as it requires market expertise and digital skills that might not be available in-house. For this reason, Vapor Pin called upon IBT Online to help them achieve their exporting objectives. IBT Online was proud to launch a best-practice, localized business development Brazilian ecommerce website as well as a targeted online marketing strategy to accompany it.

Localizing websites is more than translating a few pages – it involves deep local knowledge, wide technical experience and strong locally-based search engine optimization skills. Ecommerce plug-ins also need to be suited to the local market, taking into account local payment habits, safety and compliance regulations. For Brazilian ecommerce, according to Vice-President Laurie A. Chilcote, “We need to get online in this market”. It was the right time to call in IBT Online to ensure the Brazilian website was launched on-time and on-budget with a full ecommerce platform and online marketing strategy to power up sales.

Given the success of the localized website and strategic marketing efforts in Brazil, Vapor Pin endeavoured to further invest into launching ecommerce websites in other international target markets. As Laurie expresses: "If you want to grow your brand and expand into markets, IBT Online is the company to help you achieve those goals."

Ecommerce plays a huge part in our every day online lives- and the numbers prove it! In a population of about 7.5 billion people, 4.5 billion are online, and 3.4 billion are shopping online, meaning about 45% of the world population makes purchases via ecommerce! Although ecommerce is prevalent in many countries all over the world, here we are going to focus on the big 3: China, the United States, and the United Kingdom. 

EuroDentalDepot is the brainchild of VistaDental, where innovation is key to success. The company invents, patents, manufactures and distributes highly specific dental devices and equipment. For its home market, the United States, the company has built up a trusted network of distributors and has an established reputation for quality, built since its foundation in 1997. But for export markets, management were keen to fast-track its growth. Going online with great local websites coupled with a strong ecommerce platform provided the solution, and IBT Online was delighted to help from the outset.

The digital economy delivers. It lowers costs and barriers to markets, as well as providing access to an unprecedented number of customers (both business and consumer). The traditional routes to markets have eroded. Smart companies, notably web savvy businesses, have created and leveraged technologies to grow their online global sales, brands and businesses.

In any given “home market” there is a truism that the vast majority of your potential clients are located in, by definition, outside in those global markets. Sow the two together, online and global, and you have the driver that ensures B2B and B2C online global retail will represent >$10 trillion of transactions by 2020. And the #1 beneficiaries of the digital economy are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). If you are a decision maker in an SME, please do read on, think through the sales opportunities and the potential value to your brand and business.

Ecommerce customers – whether businesses or private consumers – want a wide choice of products, delivery times and methods, low transport costs and hassle-free returns. These three magic ingredients: choice, low transport costs and easy returns, are not always simple, especially in Europe with its 24 official languages, EU and non-EU legislation and other complexities. Ecommerce in Europe looks a whole lot harder than in the USA. Is it worth it? A growing number of companies think so, encouraged by continuing strong demand. Ecommerce in Germany, for example, topped €52 billion in 2016 and is set for more double-digit growth in 2017.

The land grab for internet users in India is in full swing and nowhere more so than in ecommerce. India now has the second largest number of internet users in the world, behind China, but this still means that about 65% of India’s population is not yet on the internet. While there are many Indian tech companies there are surprisingly few independent internet players, leaving the field open to the internet giants of the world. Google, with a historically impenetrable 96% market share in India, is facing serious competition from Chinese search engine giant Baidu. Amazon and Alibaba are dividing up online retail, gobbling up homegrown talent while Uber, Facebook and others all look for a slice of the cake.

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.