How can I tap into the overseas online market?

I would like to expand my online sales to foriegn countries.

[tomld2]

I operate a website that sells a single product. Over the past 18 months I have sold over 35,000 of this item with about 85%-90% of my orders coming from the USA. How can I tap into the Asain and European markets and increase my overseas sales? The USA is just a fraction of the world population, so I feel as if I should be able to greatly expand my sales by targeting specific countries.

Do I need to setup a distributor in each major country and also create a language specific website for each area?

Has anyone successfully tapped into the foreign online market? Any advice?

Regards,
Tom

[andy_boyd]

A good first step would be to translate the content of your site.

Sounds like you'll be shipping quite a lot of cartons, so you have options. You could:

1) Contact some of the big shippers such as UPS, FedEx, USPS and negotiate with them for delivery from you to the customer's doorstep, including customs clearance, fuel surcharge, security scans etc ... or

2) Set up a distributor in a central location such as London / Rotterdam for shipping within the EU. Both these cities are easily accessible by sea, which means you can ship by container loads. Then let the distributor do the order fulfillment for a percentage fee ... or

3) Find a shipping consolidator, there's loads of them in New York. These guys will consolidate all your orders into one consignment and ship them all to a warehouse in London, for example. They will then enter the postal system and be delivered to anywhere in Europe. I know fo a company called Interlink, who are owned by GeoPost (French National Postal Company) who are able to deliver to anywhere in Europe inside 4 - 5 days at a very reasonable cost.

Anyway, that's just a couple of options. Because you are working with a lot of cartons, you'll have bargaining power.

[lusagalo]

Hello,
I am working for a dotcom becoming glocal.

I am getting their site into a really spanish one targetting first spain to reach all spanish speakers in world.

At the begining we concentrated in having a really spanish site and in offering same level of customerīs service as any Spanish website. Itīs more than translating, adapting it to some particularities.

Secondly we tried to be visible in our niche wherever our potential customers could be.

My experience so far is that making the effort to become local pays.

We have multiplid our sales to those speakers by 3 since I came here (3 months ago) (being our prior level was nearly nothing, we have to recognize) and we are fighting to be leaders over that market which is also not as competitive as english speakers markets.

The added investiment wont be so hard as the potential growth, and if you donīt do it, someone else wil...
maybe I will do it, my friend ;)

Good luck