Global Ecommerce: Tips for International Expansion

The benefits of global ecommerce expansion are obvious: Tap into new markets and revenue streams, increase brand awareness, and boost your bottom line. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? The fact is: Global ecommerce can be complex. We surveyed 2,700 commerce leaders and they reported a few steep obstacles, including tax, customs, cultural sensitivities, and more.

For businesses that develop a thoughtful, strategic approach, the payoff is well worth the effort. Foreign sales drive an estimated 39% of revenue, on average, at companies that sell internationally. If you’re considering global ecommerce, here’s a road map and key considerations to help you find success.

Global ecommerce means selling products or services online across international borders, allowing you to reach customers anywhere in the world through digital storefronts. It involves adapting your online business to different countries' languages, currencies, payment preferences, and shipping requirements.

How big is the global ecommerce market? What are some business patterns? Here are a few key statistics you should know:

• Retail ecommerce sales are predicted to surpass $4.3 trillion in the U.S. alone.
• Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services are expected to grow by 35% annually through 2026 in Latam region.
• AI and AI agents will power 21% of global holiday sales, generating $263 billion in revenue.
• Digital commerce grew by 4% across the globe, and by 20% in Switzerland.
• Site search drives 15% of global online orders.
• Digital wallet usage will grow 22.6% over the next six years , with nearly two-thirds of all online payments expected to use digital wallets by 2030.
• Online channels like mobile commerce, social commerce, and websites are driving 54% of revenue.
• Two-thirds of commerce businesses now sell internationally, unlocking new markets and revenue streams worldwide.
• Nearly 50% of businesses can’t seamlessly sell globally because of factors like taxes, shipping, and customs.

For businesses that sell globally, international sales typically make up around 39% of total revenue. Cross-border commerce can significantly impact your revenue, but many brands struggle with expansion.

Here are a few key challenges companies face as they try to break into new markets.

Managing multiple currencies with fluctuating exchange rates while accommodating region-specific payment methods like Alipay, SEPA, or local digital wallets is complex. Customers expect to pay in their local currency using familiar payment options, but this requires the right tech stack, automations, and operational efficiency.

Solution: The right ecommerce platform will make it easy to handle multi-currency transactions and local payment methods — with no add-ons.

International shipping involves complex customs regulations and import duties. Varying delivery expectations and high costs can make products uncompetitive. Plus, returns and exchanges across borders add another layer of complexity and expense.

Solution: Partner with international fulfillment services or use local warehouses in key markets to reduce shipping costs and delivery times. Clearly communicate shipping costs, duties, and delivery timeframes upfront, and consider offering free shipping thresholds to offset international costs.

What works in one market can fail in another due to cultural differences, language nuances, and local preferences. Direct translations often overlook cultural context, resulting in confusing or even offensive messaging.

Solution: Localization should go beyond translation. Adapt content, imagery, and user experience (UX) for each market. Conduct local market research and consider hiring native speakers or local marketing experts to guide your approach. Generative AI (Gen AI) can conduct such research and help with content creation, too.

Every country has different tax requirements, data protection laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), consumer protection regulations, and import restrictions. Non-compliance can result in hefty fines, blocked sales, or legal issues.

Solution: Work with international legal experts or compliance services that specialize in ecommerce regulations. Use automated tax calculation tools and clearly document your compliance measures, privacy policies, and terms of service for each market.

Providing quality support in multiple languages, across different time zones, while handling complex international returns and refunds. Customers expect the same level of service they'd get from local businesses.

Solution: Offer multilingual chatbots for basic inquiries and establish customer service partnerships in key regions. Create comprehensive self-service resources in local languages and set clear expectations about response times for different areas. You can also implement autonomous, intelligent AI agents like Agentforce, as they can deliver more contextual and human-like customer service.

Make sure your ecommerce website performs well across varying internet speeds, devices, and regional technical standards — all while staying secure and practical. Poor performance in international markets can hinder conversions before they start.

Solution: Opt for a customer relationship management (CRM) like Commerce Cloud to address these challenges. It's built for global scalability and reliability and is backed by robust ‌infrastructure. Additionally, it supports the implementation of progressive web app (PWA) features. This way, you'll deliver superior mobile performance and user experience across all international touchpoints.

All set to get started? These tips can help you set up your business across the world:

It’s important to know your audience and deeply understand your target markets before going global. Analyze market size, research competitors, and be cognizant of trends in shopper behavior. Dig into how your target audience shops, what they expect, and even their cultural quirks. Deep dive into local consumer journeys, from discovery on platforms like WeChat to purchasing decisions.

Once you decide there’s a market opportunity, immerse yourself in the consumers. Delivering a localized experience goes far beyond site translation, although even that has nuances. A “sweater” in the U.S. is a “jumper” in the U.K., for example.

Language is the most important consideration for localization. Poor translation can be a major hindrance to conversion on foreign sites. Other factors include different address formats and varied checkout preferences. Thanks to large language models and generative AI, this can be made much more efficient and painless. For instance, generative page designers can help you create new web pages for different geographical locations in seconds with simple, conversational building tools. You can also use AI tools to localize product descriptions.

Another key to painless localization is multi-site management. Updating multiple localized websites can be extremely time-consuming if you have to manage each site and codebase on its own. The right commerce platform will make this easy by allowing you to use the same codebase across multiple sites. Imagine you have five different localized sites and you want to create a new promotion on all of them. With multi-site management and reusable components, you’d only have to make the change to your codebase once, and the experience would be updated everywhere.

True localization means diving deep into each market's unique nuances — from adapting your design and color choices for the cultural context, to restructuring navigation patterns that feel natural to local users. For instance, if you’re a U.S. based brand expanding to Japan, you might want to switch from red to blue "Buy Now" buttons (since red symbolizes danger in Japanese culture). 

On the technical side, you'll need robust infrastructure that seamlessly handles multiple languages (including right-to-left scripts), currencies, date formats, and regional address structures — all while using local hosting and content delivery networks (CDNs) to ensure fast loading times. 

Direct translation isn’t enough to launch a customer-facing storefront in a new geography. Simply translating content word-for-word without localizing it for cultural and linguistic nuance often results in unnatural language and missed search intent. This includes adapting product descriptions, currency, units of measure, cultural references, and even visuals to resonate with local audiences and search intent. Bypassing this critical step can reduce relevance in search results and keep you from connecting with local customers effectively. Special care should be taken to not just translate words, but gain traction in SERPs through thoughtful, strategic intent targeting.

It’s also critical to implement hreflang tags correctly. These tell search engines which version of a page to show to users based on their language and region. Hreflang issues can lead to duplicate content or search engines serving the wrong version of a page to users, negatively impacting your customer experience and your rankings.

Traditional SEO is changing fast as AI-powered search engines take hold. Now, businesses must optimize for agentic search. That means writing detailed, use-case specific product descriptions that illustrate how a product can be used, not just what it is.

Structured data is also critical. This is the standardized markup that lets machines read your pages with confidence. It includes identifiers such as:

• Product (name, brand, model, GTIN, MPN, dimensions, materials, variants)
• Offer (price, currency, availability, shipping & returns via shippingDetails/hasMerchantReturnPolicy) aggregateRating (stars + reviewCount)
• FAQPage for the exact questions shoppers ask

Build local partnerships with local distributors, retailers, influencers, and established marketplaces that can provide better market insights and lend credibility to your brand in unfamiliar territory. Local fulfillment centers and third-party logistics (3PL) providers can help meet regional delivery expectations, especially because they vary dramatically from cost-focused shipping in Germany to same-day delivery demands in urban China.

At least 50% of businesses face challenges regarding customs and shipping. But a trusted and global ecommerce platform can fix this. It can play a key role in navigating the maze of local product standards, safety certifications, and regulations that can make or break your market entry.

Finally, it’s the right tools that’ll help with your business’s go-to-market (GTM) strategy in unchartered territories. With Commerce Cloud, you can successfully launch your global commerce business. It provides a unified platform that supports multi-currency, multi-language, and multi-site management. Its features can help with localization and personalization, enabling a tailored shopping experience for customers in any region. You’ll expand into new markets, manage diverse product catalogs, and manage international operations from a single system.

Commerce AI can help you with end-to-end business operations — from creating marketing content and promotions to offering diverse online payment methods and sending personalized recommendations. And the best part? Commerce Cloud offers headless commerce architecture to help build highly localized, lightning-fast storefronts tailored to regional preferences. It separates the front-end experience from back-end operations, allowing quick adaptation to different markets and technologies without disrupting core commerce functions.

The right tech stack and strategic personalization efforts are key to successful global ecommerce. This is especially true for multi-site, multi-brand businesses. Here are a few examples.

Guess is not only enriching the experience for millions of customers around the world but also driving sustainable growth. The lifestyle brand, which has 1,600 stores in 100 countries as well as a flourishing wholesale business, set an ambitious goal to increase its operating profit by approximately $150 million and boost sales around $250 million by 2025. How did they do it? In one year, Guess deployed Commerce Cloud across 48 European countries with the support of Salesforce Professional Services. Guess saw an immediate uptick in website speed and reliability with a 72% reduction in home page loading times.

“With Commerce Cloud, we can respond more rapidly and flexibly to customer behaviors and market trends,” said Patrizia Lazzaro, Guess Vice President for Ecommerce for the company’s operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).

And the best part? This led to a 60% increase in their conversion rates, because Guess personalized their services for every region.

Siemens faced the complex task of unifying siloed hardware and software offerings into a seamless, personalized online marketplace experience for customers worldwide. Commerce Cloud helped Siemens Xcelerator Marketplace (functional across 190 characters) create tailored customer journeys. As Commerce Cloud is integrated with AI, Siemens seamlessly launched an AI-based app to empower field agents and sales with AI-driven insights and recommendations before their field visits.

With a thoughtful, strategic approach to global commerce, expanding into new markets can dramatically increase your revenue and customer base. A flexible, scalable commerce platform is key to finding success in new regions across the globe. Your ecommerce solution should make it easy to create and manage local site instances, as well as deploy localized marketing messages and promotions, global content strategies, custom price lists, and more. This is the beating heart of any successful global ecommerce endeavor.