The world is getting smaller. Thanks to the internet, it has become possible for businesses to reach customers and sell products across the globe, without their physical presence in all those markets. Through online selling channels, it has become easier than ever to expand on a global scale and reach new markets. Magento is a popular e-commerce platform built with the international market in mind, offering many features that will enable your business to enjoy all the benefits of e-commerce and to achieve your global ambition.
When Magento is installed, a main website, default store, and store view are created. You can create as many additional websites, stores, and store views as you need. Within each website, you can have multiple stores, and within each store, separate views.
At Site Level
By enabling multiple websites on the same account, you are able to use the local country domain for each your stores. Also, each website can be changed and managed to fit with local laws, taxes and local payment options. One example for the EU is the mandatory cookie policy notification, which must be displayed to users upon entering the website. Using separate websites for each of the stores means that only those located in the EU will see the notification. It is also possible to achieve this by using IP Geolocation, which allows your website to know where the customer is located based on their IP address, and can also suggest their local website if they visit a different one.
Logistics are another area that Magento can support on the website level. With each new country, a new system of shipping and delivery infrastructure must also be arranged. Through the use of powerful automation features, Magento is able to streamline the shipping process and fulfill customer demand across multiple locations. Using enterprise grade API, Magento can easily connect with third party warehouse management services and enterprise resource planning systems. You are able to manage everything from the initial import to setting the delivery rates using Magento’s shipping feature. This again greatly reduces the time and resources needed for setting up logistical services for your ecommerce store.
To achieve global expansion and reach all of your customers, you need to be able to ship globally using international carriers. It is possible to connect with a range of different global mail carriers through Magento, allowing you to receive real time shipping rates, meaning you can compare and see which offers the best price. The ability to specify the countries where certain shipping methods are available is also useful when entering new markets, while maintaining separate services based on the facilities available to your business in each location.
At Store View Level
At the multi store view level, you can localize a website by displaying translated text and local currencies for each of your markets. Magento’s unified management will greatly reduce the time and effort needed to set up and manage your website in different locations.
Multiple language support is an important part of entering new markets. While English is often used as the lingua franca, using it as the sole language option would alienate a large portion of the population. As such, translating your text into the local language is the best way to maximise your audience. This is possible using the multi-store view feature, allowing each location using a different language. There is also the option to offer multiple languages to users within one website too, for multilingual countries. Adding to this, Magento supports international characters such as accented letters and right to left text too.
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As a new competitor in the market, you will likely face some difficulty. It takes more than just opening a store locally to truly penetrate the local market. The best way to adjust your brand for the local market and build trust amongst your audience would be to practice some cultural sensitivity and tailor your website accordingly. This could involve adding pop culture references to text, translations, or simply acknowledging national holidays in the new market. Doing these things will help your website to integrate into the local market.
Everything is centralized in the Magento platform and can be monitored collectively. Having this data consolidated into one place is one way in which Magento minimizes the amount of time it takes for administration of your websites. Having all of these abilities in one platform is very cost effective, with new functionality being added all the time through updates, and extensions that are available in the marketplace.
With this array of features, Magento is able to effectively facilitate global expansion and adapt to new markets. The benefits of features such as multi-site, multi store view, and shipping are numerous, greatly reducing the resources needed for managing and maintaining separate websites.
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