#XmasEcom | 5 Tips to Ensure Your E-com Store Appeals to International Shoppers – Kwintessential

As part of our international e-commerce campaign to help businesses get ready for the Christmas shopping season, Neil Payne from Kwintessential has shared his five top tips to help you understand and address the needs of different markets.

Tip 1:  Are your order and delivery dates appropriate for your target market?

Understand if your target markets celebrate Christmas on a different day and how this will impact orders, deliveries and other key milestones. Consider what additional order and delivery dates you’ll need to list on your website / e-commerce platform.

Other Christmas celebration dates include:

• Germany and the Nordic countries: 24 December 2014
• Russia and other Eastern Orthodox countries: 7 January 2015

Tip 2:  Is your e-commerce platform optimised for the season?

Review your content descriptions, meta tags and titles: give them a Christmas tweak to include keywords and search terms people may use at this time of year.

Search Engine Optimisation is key to your product being found by the right person. Make sure you tailor your keywords to fit in with big events that are country-specific to improve the chances of your product ranking highly in search engines on a global level – e.g. ‘Christmas gifts’ or ‘Cyber Monday’.

Tip 3:  Can your target market audience easily understand your product offerings?

If you’re receiving orders from a particular country, research what other products they may be ordering for Christmas and try to tap into that demand.

Most e-commerce platforms offer a ‘related product’ section that entices buyers to make additional purchases. Consider adding this to your website or include it in your marketing material to existing customers.

Tip 4:  Is your target audience looking for any specific products?

Clearly demonstrate on your website that you have Christmas offers in the target language and state that you deliver to their country.

Consider spending a couple of hours researching Christmas delivery times / last postage dates and costs to your top destinations to include in your product listings. This can have a big impact on your international sales.

Tip 5:  Are you offering the right products to the right region?

Not every country celebrating Christmas will be cold. Adapt what you sell to accommodate countries like South Africa and Australia.

For example, it’s common for Australians to have Christmas crackers, Christmas trees and decorations as we do in the UK – but they tend to have a barbecue for Christmas lunch rather than a turkey!

So here are Neil’s tips – and if you missed last week’s tips from Andy Geldman at Webretailer, catch up here.

Next week we’ll be looking at ‘Getting the best out of marketplaces’ with Dan Wilson from Tamebay. Don’t forget to follow our daily tips and share your own experiences – and if you have any questions about planning your Christmas 2014 e-commerce strategy, just post them in our forum, e-mail [email protected] or tweet us @OpentoExport (#XmasEcom).