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A U.S. catalog retailer expands its Web commerce presence in Europe. An online auctioneer offers special programs in 53 U.S. metropolitan areas to move big-ticket items that don't sell well on its global site. A West Coast financial institution taps the Web to sell home equity loans nationwide for the first time, doubling such sales in the first month.
All these companies are trading on the new Internet geography, which lets local businesses go global overnight and forces some global companies to reassess their regional marketing and IT strategies.
But extending your reach doesn't necessarily expand your business. The key to success, say e-businesses and analysts, is tailored products and site content. Outside the United States, that also means doing business in local languages, and billing and settling transactions in local currencies, according to local regulations.
"It might sound contradictory, but a successful global e-commerce strategy will involve thinking locally in each of the individual markets," said Anna Giraldo-Kerr, an analyst with International Data Corp. "Companies are finding that the cookie-cutter approach does not work."
Most online sales are now in the United States, but that demographic is changing, particularly in the business-to-consumer market, according to IDC. Online spending in Western Europe, which stood at $5.6 billion in 1998, will increase 138 percent a year to reach $430 billion by 2003, the firm projects. Online spending in the Asia-Pacific region (excluding Japan) will quadruple, to more than $81 billion by 2003, IDC said. U.S. spending, in comparison, will grow 80 percent a year, to $708 billion.
Nearly every company that sells on the Web, regardless of size, is extending its reach. Even catalog retailer Lands' End, which already has customers in 160 countries, is intent on carving out a bigger slice in targeted markets abroad.
"Every day that our site is not up and running in the customer's local language, we're losing business," said Bill Bass, vice president of e-commerce at Lands' End, which last week launched Web sites aimed at the German and U.K. markets. "The customers' experience is materially better if they can shop in their own language and if the content they see fits with their specific wants and needs."
To that end, Lands' End is using a combination of home-grown...