Online retailers must recognise cultural differences to thrive, says Ulric Jerome.

Online retailers most recognise cultural differences to thrive, says Ulric Jerome.

Ecommerce is just pure retail – the only difference is that we sell online.

I am 34. I have been working in the internet since the age of 20 and in ecommerce since 22. When I joined Pixmania in early 2002, we were only six people trading in one country. We now employ 1,400 Pixmaniacs, have more than 10 million customers and a turnover of o828m (£664m).

At the start we naively thought that it was going to be quite simple to operate an ecommerce site in multiple countries in Europe – after all, the internet has no boundaries. However, after 11 years of trading, we are the only website in Europe operating in 26 countries – our main competitor only operates in five.

Why? Because ‘Europe’ may be a beautiful concept but it just does not exist. That might sound extreme, but it isn’t too far from reality.

In order to increase the chances of success for an ecommerce operation in Europe you need to adapt to each and every one of the countries.

Forget about running an online business with one language or currency, with one or two transport companies, only with credit cards, according to one legal framework – it will just not work.

We work with 11 currencies, 38 payment methods, 19 languages, 90 different taxes and 26 legal frameworks. We encountered all the possible pitfalls.

Some of those I would love to share. When we opened in Italy in 2002, we only allowed payments via credit cards; we quickly realised that 50% of payments for online orders were made via cash on delivery, a cultural thing. When we started to offer cash on delivery our turnover grew by 50% overnight.

In Sweden, 80% of our shipments are delivered through pick-up points, whereas this delivery method is almost non-existent in the UK.

In the Czech Republic, Google is not number one, it’s Seznam. If you don’t know that you can’t be the market leader.

In Germany, online shoppers mostly buy through price comparison websites, whereas in all the other countries it is through search engines.

We have turned the complexity of running a European ecommerce website into our competitive advantage. Internet maturity varies per country. In the UK, 80% of the population is connected and 72% of those are shoppers.

In Spain, only 54% is connected and 43% are shoppers. That’s why we decided to open physical Pixmania Stores in Spain – we need to reach the entire market.

We are not a pan-European website – I don’t believe in that term, it is not realistic. We are an ecommerce company operating in multiple countries in Europe. That’s different.

The way I see it is that ecommerce is, at the end of the day, commerce. We source products at the best possible price and we then sell them to the maximum amount of people, taking into consideration their habits and differing cultures – and all of that with top-of-the-line service. Online retail is retail.

  • Ulric Jerome is executive director of Pixmania