If your business is doing well and you want to take things up a gear, you might be thinking about international expansion. There are a lot of risks involved, but the potential rewards are huge if you get it right. Expanding into new markets can increase sales in a huge way and if you are able to build a global brand, there is no limit to what your business can achieve.
But before you start daydreaming about all of that, you need to decide which countries your business is going to expand into. There are a lot of factors to consider here and you need to think about where your business is most likely to be well received. However, the best countries for most US businesses to expand into are the UK, Canada, and Australia. These are some of the big benefits of expanding into these countries.
Relatively Simple Customs Laws
Navigating customs laws is one of the trickiest things about international expansion. There’s a whole load of paperwork involved with getting your goods across the border and if you get it wrong, there will be massive delays. Customers don’t like waiting a long time for deliveries, so this is bad news for your business.
Canada, the UK, and Australia all have relatively simple customs laws for goods coming in from America, so you can make life easier for yourself. However, you should still use customs brokerage services to simplify the process even further. They can handle everything on your behalf so you only need to focus on marketing the business and generating sales instead of worrying about complicated customs forms.
There’s No Language Barrier
The language barrier is one of the biggest hurdles to international expansion and it can be expensive to get around. You may need to pay for an interpreter if you are making deals with suppliers and distributors in other countries. Your website will need updating too so it caters to people that don’t speak English. This all gets expensive quite quickly, but you don’t need to worry about that when shipping to English-speaking countries. International expansion is already risky and removing the language barrier will make things run a lot smoother.
Credit Card Use Is High
Online shopping is reliant on credit card use, and this is something that you should consider when deciding which countries you should ship to. When using a credit card, you get a lot of protection online, which is so important for the consumer. In countries where credit card use is low, people are less likely to shop online because it is riskier. Building a safe platform is one of the key aspects of ecommerce success, so working in countries with a higher level of safe credit card transactions should always be a priority.
Before you move into a new country, it’s always important to do your research and determine whether there is a demand for your products. However, you also need to consider the logistics of shipping internationally and how they affect you. In that sense, the UK, Canada, and Australia are the best countries to ship to.
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