Etailers chasing overseas expansion face a series of obstacles to success

The inevitable defeat of England in the World Cup last weekend was tempered a little by beating the Australians at cricket again but it got me thinking - how would we fare if there were an ecommerce World Cup?

The weakness of the pound in the past couple of years and a slowing of UK internet growth has made international expansion the most recent ecommerce cause célèbre.

Many pure-play and high street names have either aggressively expanded the countries they will ship to, started to offer additional currencies, translated websites or set up logistical and support operations. These are roughly in order of complexity.

Having gone through the first three of these at Mandmdirect.com, I know the task of competing in these markets isn’t as easy as it first appears.

The first obstacle is payment methods. The Germans may rank highly on defence penetration but the same can’t be said for credit/debit card penetration, with the preference being either a bank transfer or sending a cheque. Not very dotcom.

And then there’s the widely different distance-selling regulations, amazing for a common market, which I am sure over time will get easier with the help of input from the BRC. Did you know you have to offer free returns to German customers if an item is over e40? I do now.

Translation raises the complexity level even further and certainly will make a difference in the chosen countries. There are many ways either tactically or strategically to achieve this, and while a strategic approach will enable you to translate many countries concurrently you will still need language-trained customer service people and marketeers, which means additional cost and complexity.

Even then, each country will have its nuances - on launching our German language site we were told to convert some of the German back in to English because it was “cooler”.

Finally you have logistics. It is possible to ship from a warehouse in Herefordshire to much of Europe in 48 hours but you have to pay up to ensure 100% reliability. The cheaper the price the harder it is to convince a Spanish postie to speed up a bit.

Given these complexities, those British businesses that have been doing well online in Europe and beyond should rank us highly in international ecommerce capability.

I genuinely believe they do, but not for the reasons you may think. I have always contended that the UK breeds a high calibre of retailer (being a competitive island and having to fight for every pound) and I think this is the same in etail too.

It is one of the reasons a business like Asos has done so well - its offer is immense, its product amazing and all beautifully merchandised.

I do think though that European businesses are better at bridging the cultural/language gap and until we step change our capability, maybe through acquisition, I predict a 1-1 draw but a win in extra time.

Steve Robinson is chief executive of M and M Direct