Cross-border shopping is the fastest-growing piece of the B2C e-commerce market, according to Accenture. This means that your online business is already international, whether or not you planned to sell globally.
To claim your biggest slice of the giant global market — and manage the opportunities and risks that go with it — review the following three pieces of advice. They will help you put a payments infrastructure in place to drive conversions, control costs and minimize risk from international transactions.
1. Act Like a Local
Online businesses need to turn browsers into buyers to succeed. In international markets, localizing the sales and payment process can help. Consider:
- Speaking to customers in their own language on the checkout and payment pages. If you’re just starting to actively market your business abroad, target other English-speaking countries before branching out to markets that require translation.
- Pricing goods or services in a country’s local currency. Spare your customers the trouble of calculating exchange rates and keep them moving right along to complete their purchases.
- Allowing customers to use local payment methods. While most U.S. shoppers reach for their credit cards, many consumers elsewhere prefer to pay in other ways, such as native direct debit payments.
2. Seek Help with Swipe Fees
It’s important to understand interchange rates — also known as swipe fees — which you incur every time you accept a credit or debit card for payment. Remember to:
- Ask your merchant services provider to direct you to the international interchange rates that most card brands now publish, and ask them for guidance on obtaining the lowest rates.
- Find out how you may be able to qualify for lower rates. For example, if you have a high average ticket, your merchant services provider may advise you on how to submit more detailed transaction data – like level 2 or 3 data – to ensure you receive a reduced large-ticket interchange rate.
3. Fight International Fraudsters
Building your global customer base opens up new avenues for business, but it may also increase your exposure to card-not-present fraud. Make sure your e-commerce stack includes robust fraud prevention, and review and update its settings frequently. Find out if a system allows you to:
- Automatically score risks to flag potentially suspicious transactions. Among the factors the system may look at are whether an order is coming from a high-risk country, whether a card number has recently been used for a high number of attempted transactions, and whether a shipping address is near the card billing address.
- Manually review transactions that fall between being automatically rejected and accepted.
- Maintain a database with a list of proven offenders whose transactions you will reject. Take care that your criteria for inclusion are not overly broad so that you don’t lose legitimate business.
"Tapping your global growth potential may be easier than you think"
Ultimately, the payments strategy you choose will depend on the maturity of your business and how aggressively you market your goods and services to buyers in different locations overseas. If you have the right payments platform and partner helping you as you scale up, tapping your global growth potential may be easier than you think.
Read more about SVB Global Merchant Services and how we can help you plan for growth.
Related Content
Read more in our series about how to optimize your company's payments tools and processes on SVB's Payments Trends & Insights page.
All non-SVB named companies listed throughout this document are independent third parties and are not affiliated with Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company.
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