How to create a cross-border eCommerce strategy

Whether your business is expanding internationally for the first time or is already a global player, you can unlock immense opportunities with cross-border eCommerce. Learn how enterprises can expand internationally with commercetools, so you can adapt successfully to local audiences and grow, no matter where you’re headed next.   

As the name suggests, cross-border eCommerce is about selling goods digitally beyond a company’s domestic market, usually to overcome saturation and create new opportunities. 

While international trade isn’t new, cross-border digital commerce remains a key growth engine for businesses, even in turbulent times involving political conflicts and, more recently, the introduction of increased tariffs by the United States government. Despite a potential recession and an environment of constant change, digital-first commerce across the globe remains a strategic route to build business resilience. 

Investing in cross-border eCommerce brings a bounty of benefits for brands, retailers and the B2B sector: 

Create demand all year round

Sell your products to new markets by tapping into different seasons and local festivities. By shifting to another customer base during a specific period, e.g., summer/winter seasons or back-to-school, you can maximize sales of low-demand products in your domestic market. 

Augment your customer base 

Many enterprises find that they have reached a peak in their domestic markets or that they have little room to grow. Expanding your business internationally provides a path to find new customers who might be eager to shop for exactly what you’re selling. 

Tackle opportunities in booming markets

Are there countries or regions that have become too much of an opportunity to pass? Expanding to countries that offer concrete advantages, both short- and long-term, is the chance to increase customer base as well as your bottom line. 

Increase brand awareness 

Investing in a multi-country approach is a natural fit for enterprises looking for ways to increase brand value beyond their domestic borders. After all, most customers — B2C or B2B — prefer to purchase with brands they already know. 

Despite a wide range of benefits, enabling a cross-border shopping experience doesn’t come without challenges. For example:

• Every country has its own regulations and tax systems you have to follow, which impact pricing and shipping costs. For instance, the recent introduction of new tariffs by the United States government is likely to increase consumer prices and lead to a global trade recession. 

• Shipping may also become problematic depending on the country you’re establishing an online presence. 

• Omnichannel experiences may become less standardized for your brand to accommodate country-specific requirements and customer expectations. If you’re only expanding your eCommerce but not investing in a physical store, the journeys might differ from those in the countries where you have brick-and-mortar storefronts. 

• While a worldwide problem, payment fraud may be amplified in new markets. 

Even though challenges surrounding cross-border transactions will remain an issue, they aren’t stopping brands, retailers and B2B enterprises from investing heavily in international markets. The global cross-border eCommerce sales are expected to grow twice as fast as the overall eCommerce sector, reaching an estimated USD 5.6 trillion by 2030.

How do you decide where and how to expand? What are the market entry strategies you can tap into? And what technology helps you tackle these opportunities effectively? 

Let’s explore in more detail. 

Where to expand

Even if you don’t yet serve international markets, interest in your goods and services might have crossed the border. Identify your leading territories and languages behind your highest traffic, rankings and conversions. Overall, you can assess two main areas: 

Macroeconomic data 

• Market growth, eCommerce revenue forecast and demand. 

• Digital maturity and online penetration. 

• Geopolitical stability and economic developments. 

• Gross domestic product (GDP), population numbers and consumer spending. 

Cross-border eCommerce readiness

• Localization: Market regulations and compliance, language, pricing strategy, etc. 

• International payments: Payment methods, currency conversions and volatility. 

• Shipping and distribution: Customs, tariffs, calculating total landing cost, reverse logistics for returns.

With these insights, examine where to focus your efforts and the eCommerce market strategies that best fit your budget and goals. 

Market entry strategies

As each market has its own characteristics, consider the pros and cons of each eCommerce entry option: Marketplaces, B2B2C and direct-to-consumer (D2C).

With about 50% of retail eCommerce sales happening on marketplaces like Amazon, Alibaba, Mercado Libre and Taobao, brands might consider it the easiest and cheapest option. Indeed, adding product catalogs to a marketplace presents near-zero investment or risk, which may be ideal for high-risk markets or as a starting point for an international expansion.

Brand-agnostic shoppers — those who know what they want but not who they want — tend to use online marketplaces, so they’re a great place to experiment before launching your D2C footprint. In the long run, however, marketplaces are essentially crowded platforms where brands have low visibility, compete on price and have no direct contact with customers.

B2B2C stands for business-to-business-to-consumer and, as the name implies, it’s a model in which a company sells its product or service in partnership with a B2C organization. This approach makes sense for companies wary of investing in a direct-to-consumer strategy due to a lack of budget or for highly regulated markets like China.     

Direct-to-consumer (D2C) is the business model of selling products directly to consumers and bypassing third-party intermediaries, such as marketplaces or distributors. On the global stage, brands opt for D2C instead (or in addition to) adding products on marketplaces and/or opening physical stores to:

• Control brand messaging and consumer engagement. 

• Create direct access to customers and their data for deeper personalization. 

• Gain higher margins and strengthen brand loyalty.

Companies can go D2C globally from a single website, which works well when targeting geographically close markets that share a common language, such as the US and Canada or Germany and Austria. A more sophisticated D2C alternative is to create localized eCommerce sites and touchpoints, which requires more effort and investment but is ideal for curating audiences and creating tailored customer experiences.

Ultimately, marketplaces are suitable for introducing your brand and creating early traction, especially in high-risk markets, and B2B2C is an option for regulated markets that are hard to enter. Creating a D2C approach, on the other hand, might require more investment, but it provides the foundation for growth in the long run for your strategic markets.

eCommerce technology 

For businesses expanding internationally, their eCommerce technology must support their aspirations. From easy product catalog localization to supporting multiple currencies and languages, the operationalization of your strategy makes all the difference to your bottom line. 

Unified commerce technology is perfectly crafted to meet the needs of enterprises expanding to multiple countries. Instead of investing in disparate systems to support each and every single country/region, which increases costs and complexity significantly, you can unify all your countries in one platform while customizing each locale to specific requirements. 

This means your business can maintain one master product catalog and tailor each country/region to display only relevant products, inventory, pricing and customer data. You can also configure different currencies, languages, tax rates and payment methods according to country-specific requirements while maintaining visibility across all your markets. 

Composable commerce is what makes this level of flexibility and scalability possible. Its modular architecture allows businesses to integrate best-of-breed services and build tailored commerce experiences for each market, without having to replatform or duplicate systems. By decoupling the frontend and backend and supporting API-first integrations, composable commerce enables brands to easily plug in localization services, regional payment gateways, tax engines and fulfillment providers as needed.

In short, unified commerce centralizes customer and operational data across all channels and markets. Composable commerce allows you to quickly adapt that framework to local nuances, market shifts and business growth, without compromising consistency or control.

Addressing local markets shouldn’t be an afterthought for your business. When adopting a D2C strategy, localizing your brand and products is the key to success. More than language translation, consumers expect brands to consider market and cultural aspects, including:

• Language nuances, e.g., “sweater” in the US and “jumper” in the UK. A well-localized shop also directly impacts SEO performance. 

• Imagery with local models.

• Locally relevant digital channels, e.g., WeChat in China and WhatsApp in Europe. 

• Checkout for each locale’s pricing, currency, and payment methods, as well as the ability to work with dynamic pricing and conversion rates. 

• Seasonal campaigns, e.g., Cyber Week in the US and Diwali in India. For instance, Black Friday may happen at different times in different countries, as well as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day or Back-to-School. 

• Industry-specific regulations and local requirements; fashion companies may have to adapt product information following local sizing. 

Here are some best practices on how to use eCommerce localization based on consumers’ local preferences using a unified commerce approach: 

• Visitors can choose the website’s language and location separately. This is particularly important for countries with multiple official languages, like Switzerland and Singapore. 

• Promote products and content for distinct audiences — from one commerce backend. 

• Manage localized content, images, products, payment methods, currencies and pricing as a single function in the commerce backend across distinct touchpoints. 

• By integrating with APIs, create and adapt commerce features suitable for specific local markets, such as payments, from third-party experts. 

Omnichannel may be a subset of localization, but there’s more than just plugging the channels customers want to engage in. In addition to managing multiple touchpoints, omnichannel commerce makes shoppable moments cohesive instead of disconnected channel hopping.

Unified commerce is crucial to enabling the omnichannel and personalization experiences customers expect, no matter where they are. By managing data centrally through a unified platform, businesses can optimize the buying journey in real-time, such as product information and availability, to meet local needs. This allows you to:

• Gain a holistic view of customer preferences, behaviors and purchase history across all channels and locations.

• Deliver personalized product recommendations and inspirational content based on real-time context and intent.

• Map and analyze the end-to-end customer journey to proactively identify friction points and improve the overall experience.

• Optimize inventory and fulfillment strategies, ensuring products are available where and when customers want them, whether online, in-store, or via hybrid fulfillment options.

• Enable seamless transitions between channels (e.g., buy online, return in store) with consistent experiences and accurate data.

Integrating locale-specific payment solutions is critical for success in international markets. With the commercetools Payment Hub, businesses can easily connect to a wide range of global and local payment providers through a single integration layer. This allows for seamless support of region-specific payment methods, such as digital wallets, bank transfers or cash-based options, ensuring frictionless checkout experiences tailored to customer preferences in each market. 

By decoupling payment processing from the core commerce system, brands can adapt quickly to regional trends, regulatory changes or evolving consumer behaviors without the overhead of rebuilding their infrastructure.

Creating customer experiences that resonate with local buyers may need an extra innovation push in terms of localization, personalization and omnichannel without conflicting with your global brand. This is where composable commerce shines; its modularity and flexibility make it easier to create and adapt your customer experiences by experimenting, trying things out and constantly releasing incremental innovation to wow your customers. 

In addition, it’s vital to achieving a high-performance and fast customer experience:

• The ability to scale online capacity during traffic peaks — think Black Friday and Cyber Monday — is crucial for meeting demand without downtime or slowdowns. 

• Consistent information across touchpoints like product, pricing and inventory is crucial for a user-friendly experience. Customers should be able to find the product they’re looking for and the information they need, no matter what channel they’re using. 

• Mobile-first shopping is increasing globally; device responsiveness is a must-have.  

• Boosting website performance also means creating customer-centric storefronts with easy-to-access features, including Google-like search and streamlined checkout.

Expanding into global markets can be a powerful growth driver — but only if your technology is ready to support the complexity that comes with it. From localization to compliance, payment integration to inventory orchestration, succeeding in cross-border eCommerce requires flexibility and control.

This is where commercetools shines. With its composable commerce architecture and support for unified commerce, you can build a global commerce strategy that adapts to local needs without duplicating systems or creating silos. Maintain one central platform, tailor experiences per market and scale with agility as you grow.

Here are five high-level steps to begin your journey: 

1. Define your target markets and identify local requirements, from language and currency to fulfillment and compliance.

2. Assess your current tech stack and identify what you need to leverage from commercetools, what you can develop in-house and what best-of-breed solutions you need from experts.

3. Use composable building blocks from commercetools to design localized experiences for each region, such as country-specific checkout flows and local payment providers via the Payment Hub.

4. Leverage unified commerce principles to ensure consistent data, personalized experiences and operational visibility across all touchpoints and countries.

5. Iterate and expand, adding new regions and capabilities as needed, without replatforming or disrupting your business.

With commercetools, you’re not just launching into new markets; you’re building a future-proof, scalable cross-border eCommerce ecosystem. Now is the time to unlock your global potential.

Ready for the next step? Check out our article on how commercetools enables a frictionless multi-country approach with omnichannel and internationalization capabilities.