eCommerce merchants literally have global power in their hands. Managing large-scale retail operations used to mean traveling the globe to check on suppliers, international warehouses and inventories, brick-and-mortar store locations, accounting practices, shipping providers, and more. Now, thanks to web-hosting technology like Magento, it’s possible to do all this and more from a mobile app in the palm of your hand.
From monitoring your stock inventory to giving access to site administrators, Magento users can do it all from one admin interface in a single app. Ready to break into international markets? Here’s what Magento can do for you.
How Magento Helps Merchants Go Global
Selling outside the United States isn’t just for Amazon, Alibaba, and eBay. Of the nearly 300,000 U.S. companies that export goods, 97% are small or medium-sized businesses. These businesses need marketable products, but they also need reliable technology to build online eCommerce websites that deliver a quality experience to customers wherever they are.
The eCommerce explosion has created a saturated market for eCommerce hosting providers, but Magento, now Adobe Commerce, is one of the leaders in website-building technology and is used by retail giants such as Coca-Cola, Nike, and Samsung.
Entering new markets can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. It’s best to take scaling one step at a time, to test out strategies and tweak them as you progress.
Deciding to do business in a new geographic or product area requires doing research on your target market so that you know what products and services to offer, how to shape the customer experience, and what you need to do to comply with the legal and compliance framework. Then, you need a web builder that provides you with the flexibility you need to customize your sites for the local market.
The Europe-based IT consulting agency Inviqa lays out how Magento’s flexibility is based on four levels of store setup. Different configurations are applied at one or more of these levels to create customized websites for customers in multiple countries or for multiple-brand websites.
For more on Magento, read “17 Things Merchants Need to Know Before They Commit to Magento as Their ECommerce Platform”
Magento’s Four-Level Store Setup for Customization and Scaling
Magento’s four levels for store setup are Global, Website, Store, and Store View. Here’s how each level works.
1. The Global Level
Some settings for an ecommerce website will be the same regardless of the number of additional websites added on to serve different global regions. For example, your inventory might be common across all stores, or you might set a global price that converts to local currency on a local website. These features are set at the global level.
2. The Website
One or more stores and websites can be hosted on a single Magento installation. Having multiple stores helps if any of the following apply:
- You want to set different prices across stores.
- Stores have varying tax requirements.
- Stores have different base currencies.
- You want to offer different payment options among stores.
- You want to offer different shipping options.
- You want to separate customer accounts by country.
Let’s say you have a broad product base and different brands. To separate your customer data according to brand, it makes sense to have a separate website for each brand so that users create an account for each website. That way, your data will be easier to collect and analyze.
3. The Store Level
Your product catalog, or root category, is configured at the store level, and multiple stores under the same website can have different catalog structures with different product categories.
A clothing store might have a root category of men’s clothing and a root category of women’s clothing with a website for each. The stores do not need to look the same and can be branded differently. However, they can all be managed from the main admin interface. From the main interface, you can control the functions and elements on the sites and control who has access to what data.
4. The Store View Level
The store view level is where merchants can set the website content to serve the local market. Currency, orders, language, and payment gateways are all managed at the store view level.
The table below shows what features are configured at which of the four levels.
|
Feature |
Global |
Website |
Store |
Store View |
|
Stock |
X |
|
|
|
|
Root category |
|
|
X |
|
|
Product settings |
|
X |
|
|
|
Prices |
|
X |
|
|
|
Tax class |
|
X |
|
|
|
Base currency |
|
X |
|
|
|
Display currency |
|
|
|
X |
|
Category settings |
|
X |
|
X |
|
System config |
|
X |
|
X |
|
Orders |
|
|
|
X |
|
Customers |
|
X |
|
|
Source: Inviqa
For eCommerce merchants who go global, Magento offers critical features that facilitate scaling.
Scaling and the Shopping Experience
Magento gives merchants the power to customize their websites and offers a localized, high quality customer experience in any location. For example, popular and secure payment portals and convenient shipping and returns.
Customer log in: If you have multiple websites, you can manage your customers at the global or website level with separate log ins. If customers have to log into to a separate website, the data collected from different websites and according to location, product, or brand are easier to analyze and apply to business strategy.
If managed at the global level, customers use one username and password to log in to any of your websites. However, if you have multiple brands, it makes more sense to manage them at the website level. For example, when shopping on a website, selected products remain in the shopping basket when a customer leaves a website.
Payments, currency, and shipping: Magento allows merchants to accept different payment and shipping methods for different local markets.
Payment gateways are the biggest cause of cart abandonments. And that’s because customers want to use particular payment modes, or they don’t trust that their data will be secure. According to Digital Commerce 360, “Global customers expect to make online payments in their local currencies. If they can’t, the result is clunky experiences for consumers and missed opportunities for merchants.”
Different countries have different payment preferences and gateways to those used in the United States. Magento allows for check and pay on delivery, which are not common to the United States but are still used in other countries.
At the website level, you can set different prices for different locations, and users can select the currency displayed as they browse your site.
Magento also allows you to receive payments in multiple currencies but be paid in your “home” currency. For example, if you set the “base Currency” to U.S. dollars, you’ll always receive the amount in U.S. dollars regardless of the displayed currency your customer sees on your website. This helps merchants with local warehouses and offices in more than one country because payment can be taken in the currency you use to do business in a particular country.
Magento partnered with Temando in 2017 to create Magento Shipping to provide courier integrations for rates, tracking, and complex shipping rules.
Product catalog and product attributes: Magento allows you to create custom attributes for your products in global, website, or store view. For example, if you sell clothes, sizing is different depending on the country. A size 4 in the United States is approximately a size 8 in the United Kingdom. Merchants can add a “Size” attribute that lets the shopper see corresponding sizes for their locality or country.
Multi-lingual sites: Magento allows you to configure websites so visitors can choose what language they use to browse your site.
Scaling and Logistics
Multiple inventories and warehouses: You may have inventories in multiple locations. Magento 2 has introduced the capability to manage multiple inventories.
Scaling and Branding
Merchants can build new websites for new brands on their original installation or build on existing brands with new products.
Themes: Merchants can change themes for each site at the store view level. Merchants can select a parent theme and customize local stores at the website or store view levels.
Scaling and Marketing
Understanding local markets and consumers is key to scaling. Websites can be customized to offer different promotions and product mixes that appeal to local consumers and markets.
Promotions: Promotions can be applied to one or more websites. Before you enter a new market and create a website for that market, it’s critical to understand the consumer culture. For example, what are the payment and delivery preferences, what are the right terms for products in the local language, how are your products used in that culture? Armed with this knowledge, marketing campaigns and promotions can target local pop culture, events, and national holidays.
Product Visibility and Terminology: Magento allows you to control product (SKU) visibility at the website level. This means that you can adjust product sets on different websites while managing all your products, settings, and orders in one Magento installation. This is useful when there are differences in product names and terminologies. For example, in the United Kingdom, products with the word “fancy dress” have a 250 percent greater chance of being sold in the United Kingdom compared with items containing the word “costume,” which is the term used in the United States
Scaling and Administration
The flexibility in website building that Magento provides means that merchants can gather data that is more organized. This makes it easier to analyze data for future business strategy.
Accounting and Analytics: Data from Magento and Google Analytics allow merchants to analyze customer behavior through data in all territories. This knowledge informs marketing, functionality, shipping, and payments strategy in various markets.
Compliance and Security: Countries and regions have familiar payment gateways, and a redirect to an external site for payment could cause consumers to feel their payment is insecure. It’s important to know which gateways to use in each international market and ensure they are compliant for fraud protection. Magento reduces compliance responsibilities for such companies. Magento is PCI DSS compliant, and the PCI Security Standards Council helps merchants worldwide secure their payment processes and build trustworthy online stores.
Related: “How WooCommerce and Magento Are Tackling Fraud Protection”
Final Tips for Going Global with Magento
Before you enter a new market and create a website for that market, it’s critical to understand the local consumer culture so that the right features are configured in terms of payment and delivery preferences, local language, and products information and education.
Here are some overall tips for scaling with Magento.
- Understand your local markets, for example, payment preferences, delivery preferences, language, terminology, legal requirements, security compliance, and tax laws.
- Start small and test your market. For example, first try offering your products in a different language but shipping from your home base.
- Understand the tax implications of sending goods abroad and decide how you will handle returns and payments.
- Consider how advanced the internet infrastructure is in the countries you intend to do business in. How fast will your site be? Test your site to find out. Customers will abandon their shopping carts if pages don’t load fast enough.
Despite ticking many of the boxes for building multiple websites to serve multiple markets, an experienced technical team will ensure your global operations start smoothly and continue to operate smoothly.
Establish global reach from the palm of your hand. Contact Cartis Payments today to find out how payment gateways integrate with your website. We use Elavon’s in-house payment gateways to focus on offering omni-commerce payment solutions with no redirects and support for over 100 currencies from one merchant account.