As President Trump’s on-and-then-off-and-then-on-again tariff announcements have reminded us all, smart eCommerce businesses must diversify supply chains and markets to ensure consistent growth. No one can deny the importance of local market dominance, but eCommerce brands that don’t go international risk stagnation; or worse, backsliding with no plan B.
International eCommerce success requires more than selling directly to consumers in other countries; it necessitates handling everything from selling in local currencies to understanding international shipping, tax compliance, and cultural localization. It’s complex, but the payoff can transform businesses. Allbirds, Shein, and Next serve as a few examples of companies that boosted their annual growth rate significantly by selling internationally.
This guide walks you through key pillars in your international eCommerce strategy: eCommerce platform decisions, logistics, demand generation, localization strategies, and examples of a few brands who are doing it right.
What Is International eCommerce?
International eCommerce differs from domestic eCommerce in that everything (from UX, to checkout, logistics, and customer support) must adapt for new geographies. You’re not just selling products; you’re entering cultures, navigating regulations, and competing with local champions.
As friction drops due to platforms like Shopify Markets and Global-e, more brands have made the leap. Should your company jump on the international eCommerce bandwagon, you’ll need to plan for a number of logistical issues, including:
Cross-Border Shipping
SteelSeries ships headsets and other gamer must-haves across continents, and therefore had to prioritize finding the right regional shipping partner for each market to speed delivery and lower costs to their customers. Storing products in warehouses around key markets helps increase efficiency instead of using only one location to store all of their inventory.
Localized Currencies & Pricing
Nike offers a localized experience for its numerous markets, displaying its prices in the local currency (EUR, JPY, CAD, etc.). Offering products in only one currency (think seeing prices in USD despite being located in France) can turn international customers off and make the purchase decision less appealing.
Multi-Language Support
Not offering content in a local language is perhaps more than culturally insensitive; it’s a huge drag on conversions. Zara does a great job of not only translating its website, but offering the user choices first-thing if their current location doesn’t match their desired language. While it might seem daunting, remember you can use AI tools to help with this project.
Regional Payment Methods
Similar to language and currency localization, consumers expect to be able to use their preferred local payment methods when shopping online. Companies like H&M remove barriers at checkout with targeted options that locals want to see.
Duties & Tax Calculation
Amazon encourages users to complete transactions by displaying the final price when importing products from other countries. Buying a drumset on Amazon includes all import duties and taxes, whereas buying the same kit from Sweetwater, a great music shop for consumers in the US, will involve manually estimating how much you’ll have to pay at customs upon delivery.
Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes: which option would you prefer?
Local Returns & Fulfillment Options
Having regional fulfillment centers help cut down return shipping times and decrease shipping costs, and also avoid customer frustration. Smart brands offer local return drop-off points and prepaid labels rather than losing money on international returns.
Why Should Your eCommerce Business Go International?
As we’ve already addressed, international eCommerce requires a host of logistical planning, and undoubtedly requires working through a series of headaches. So, why should your eCommerce business sell internationally?
Revenue Diversification
Relying too heavily on a single country or region leaves brands exposed to economic slowdowns, political shifts, or changes in consumer behavior. Going global spreads your revenue risk, beyond growing the total number.
New Customer Acquisition
Once domestic customer acquisition begins to plateau, international markets offer the next great source of growth. After all, there’s a finite total addressable market in any one country.
Even the world’s most populous country, India, accounts for less than 18% of the world’s population. If you don’t want to enter a new vertical (or perhaps already have), market expansion makes logical sense.
Seasonal Balance Across Hemispheres
Selling across hemispheres helps smooth out seasonality shifts in your revenue. Apparel brands that focus heavily on one time of year can sell year-round by targeting one hemisphere for one half of the year and the other for the second half.
For instance, a brand like Patagonia can launch products on a staggered seasonal schedule, with core items like jackets selling in the Northern Hemisphere during winter, while surfwear peaks naturally during the Southern Hemisphere’s concurrent summer.
Increasing the Bottom Line
Growth comes at a higher rate in emerging markets, so if you’ve tapped out your efforts in the most developed markets, global expansion offers a fresh chance to increase profits.
Ultimately, if run well, an international eCommerce business should outperform even the best version of its one-nation self, increasing top-line revenue and future growth opportunities.
What Are The 4 Types of eCommerce?
It probably doesn’t need to be stated, but there’s more than one type of international eCommerce. Most experts have settled on four being the magic number for types of eCommerce, which we’ll delve into below, but adding government to these four types gets us to a grand total of six.
- B2C (Business-to-Consumer): Most DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands fall here. B2C eCommerce involves selling directly to international shoppers via your own site or a third-party marketplace.
- B2B (Business-to-Business): B2B eCommerce mostly consists of selling services, bulk, or wholesale products to retailers, distributors, or partners in other countries.
- C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer): Platforms like eBay or Etsy enable cross-border transactions between individuals.
- C2B (Consumer-to-Business): A newer type of eCommerce, C2B reverses the norm, allowing content creators or freelancers to sell services or content globally through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.
Bonus: Government eCommerce Types
- B2G (Business-to-Government): In B2G, businesses sell directly to governments; this is especially common in regulated industries or for health products. Businesses in the aeronautical or weapons industries often sell to governments around the world.
- C2G (Consumer-to-Government): eCommerce can also take place directly between citizens and their government (think of paying taxes), but sometimes comes through a third-party business like Razorpay, a payment gateway company.
Each type brings different compliance, fulfillment, and marketing requirements, with some brands even spanning multiple categories.
What Is the Best International eCommerce Website?
OK, so you’ve decided you want to take the plunge and launch your eCommerce brand internationally. How do you choose the right international eCommerce platform for your business?
Let’s go through some major players in the game to help you start your process:
Global-e
First up, we’ve got Global-e, a leader in international eCommerce solutions. They support over 200 markets with local currencies, more than 20 languages, tax and duty automation, and logistics partnerships.
Global-e offers end-to-end checkout and compliance, taking risk off your plate. They’ll assume legal and regulatory risk for your merchant of record setup, offer a variety of A/B testing capabilities for your checkout flow, and have a veritable roster of heavy-hitter clients like Hugo Boss, Adidas, and Netflix.
Amazon Global Selling
Next up, let’s take a look at Amazon Global Selling. This eCommerce behemoth sells in more than 20 countries, and offers the same incredibly simple user experience it offers in its home market (the US) across the globe. Depending on your needs, you can utilize Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to provide prompt shipping internationally or choose to fulfill orders on your own.
If you have a smaller regional reach, Amazon may serve you best, but if you’re looking for coverage in a broader list of markets, particularly in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, you’ll likely need to look elsewhere.
Shopify
Shopify serves as one of those potential options. As one of the most widely-used eCommerce platforms globally, it powers over 4.5 million stores in more than 175 markets.
Shopify offers a robust set of built-in features and integrations specifically designed for international eCommerce, including a centralized dashboard to manage multiple countries, currencies, and languages, local currency display based on geolocation, native translation support and app integrations, localized payment options, real-time duties and tax estimates, and fulfillment help with the Shopify Fulfillment Network.
WooCommerce
For brands that have dev power available to them and complex product catalogs or custom backend needs, WooCommerce offers a great suite of tools and support. It’s built on WordPress and offers serious customization and control to serve businesses that need a tailored international eCommerce experience.
Strategic Pillars of International eCommerce
To give you more guidance on your international eCommerce journey, we’ve compiled some key pillars of cross-border eCommerce you’ll want to plan for in order to drive the strongest sales numbers for your business.
Data-Driven Market Intelligence & Optimization
Your global eCommerce strategy needs to follow the data; it’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all strategy for the entire world. Leverage regional insights for key performance metrics like average order value by market, checkout abandonment by payment type, and promo responsiveness by country to drive incremental revenue.
Pro Tip: Build dashboards by region in your chosen measurement platform (likely Looker Studio or GA4) and track performance weekly.
Additionally, you may want to explore benchmarking tools or datasets that your international eCommerce platform offers either through their website or through your reps to see where you’ve found success and where you need to improve your numbers.
Lean heavily on your reps; remember, it’s literally their job to make sure you realize a pretty penny and don’t churn, or even better, upgrade. Use all of these data points wisely to avoid common mistakes in your analysis and run CRO tests to improve your performance in your key markets.
Demand Generation & International Paid Media
Acquiring users in new markets means reshaping your media plan. Consider a few key tactics:
- Launch local paid search and paid social campaigns. These will drive awareness and conversions, and complete your funnel with email and SMS marketing to nurture these leads. This may seem daunting, but AI can help.
- Localize your creative tests; not just in language, but culturally. Speak to your potential customers the way they speak to each other. For instance, the difference between the way European and Southeast Asian consumers communicate can prove to be stark. Don’t be too pushy in the wrong place or your conversion rate will tank.
- Build a regional eCommerce calendar to guide budget allocation. Black Friday in the US and Singles’ Day in China may serve as the best-known sales tentpole events, but others around the globe make a big impact. Don’t forget about summer and winter bonus periods in Japan, Ramadan in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and Click Frenzy in Australia when considering key moments to drive sales.
Risk & Fraud Management
Expanding globally also means dealing with currency fluctuations, increased chargeback and fraud risk, and country-specific security compliance. Global platforms often include fraud filters, but consider layering on tools like Riskified or Forter for added protection.
Brand Control & User Experience
You always want to have full brand control, but that can come at the expense of scale. Solutions like Global-e and Shopify offer incredible efficiency, but it sometimes feels like you’ve sent your potential customers into a portal entirely out of your control.
Mitigate this by customizing checkout visuals as much as possible, using branded error pages and transactional emails, and creating a clear post-purchase journey.
International eCommerce Increasingly Serves as a Must-Have for Continued Growth
The brands that win globally don’t just “go live” in new markets. They research, plan, deeply localize, iterate constantly, and choose their tech stack with intention.
This process takes time and energy, but with a projected increase in global eCommerce of over a trillion dollars between 2025 and 2027, you won’t want to miss out on your slice. With the highest projected GDP growth coming from outside the Western European, Canadian, and American markets, global eCommerce offers a gateway to a higher annual growth rate than possible if focused only on the G7.
Ready to go global? Get to work now planning out your strategy for your international eCommerce platform of choice, shipping and fulfillment logistics, local demand generation, and localization tactics, and watch your growth numbers accelerate.
