We've built a few international sites now for Tripp, a Debenhams based retailer who are rolling out eCommerce websites across Europe.
International and Global eCommerce - the opportunities for those who get it right are huge. Lots and lots of impressive statistics which all point to growth.
Some interesting snippets then......Australia was the leading growth market for UK distance sellers, Nov 2011, saw a 31% growth in package volumes going to' a land down under ' compared with Nov 2010.
A recent EU study showed that on average 23% of online shoppers purchase on websites based in another country. Which is interesting. We polled several of our leading ecommerce clients who all agreed with this trend and have seen similar results themselves via their websites.
Apparently though Brits spend the most online at present (€2,123 per capita) followed by the Scandinavians.
We haven't counted, but we believe there are around 650 million online shoppers globally out there right now, spending around €1,050 each per year. We have this on good authority from the IMRG.
BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), have about 780 million internet users right now (around 40% of internet users) - by 2015 this will have doubled and the size of the ecommerce will be huge. China will be ranked in the top 3 internet shopping countries, with Brazil and Russia in the top 10.
Also a lot of countries where broadband penetration is low (Asia and Africa) are going to simply skip ecommerce and get busy with their mobiles and buy from them (mobile eCommerce).
Mcommerce generally is growing, growing fast. 2011 - 1.2 billion mobile broadband subscriptions (up 25% in a single year). The total number of fixed line broadband ISP subscribers in the world reached 587 million last year.
Mobile eCommerce shoppers tend to only use their phones when buying online. In the US as many as 25% of mobile web users are mobile only. They can't be ignored!
Language is one fo the most important selling tools in your arsenal! If your visitors can't understand you, hey won't buy from you; you need a solution that can provide those translations!
Currently English is the most requested language on the web at 26.8% , then Chinese 24.2%, Spanish 7.8%, Japanese 4.7%, Portuguese 3.9%, German 3.6%, Arabic 3.3%, French and Russian 3% and Korean 2%. These stats are going to change a lot in the next few years with English losing its position to Chinese as the most common language online.
We could go on. We're not going to. We're just interested in working with UK based retailers who are serious about expanding their retail business online and internationally.
We've selected a very clever company called Pensio - a payment services company (with a fantastic international payment platform) to introduce to clients who need to understand this area better. We think they have the international knowledge, local awareness, banking relationships and experience that our clients will expect going forward.
We are very pleased with our new website and it works exactly how we anticipated.
Tony Parke, Reynolds Furniture
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