Scaling your ecommerce business internationally means localising your entire strategy to a new market. Serial ecom entrepreneur Nick Shackelford has mastered how to build ecommerce businesses that can scale globally, and in this article he shares his experiences and advice on how to scale fast and avoid the five most common obstacles ecommerce companies face.
Nick Shackelford made his name scaling D2C startups to multi-million euro brands, multiple times over. Over the past eleven years in the performance marketing world, he’s become one of the world’s leading ecommerce and Facebook marketers. Nick is the co-founder and managing partner at Structured Social, co-founder of Konstant Kreative and partner at BRĒZ.
“Understand that you do need money for ecommerce growth,” says Nick. Expanding to new markets means increased costs, so you’ll need to be prepared to invest revenue here.
To maximise your margins, you need to both generate and preserve revenue when it comes to marketing. “Generation means acquisition and content, and preservation is email and community management,” explains Nick.
To effectively run ads and maximise your revenue with capital, you need a bank that understands the needs of an ecommerce business. “A lot of traditional banks don’t know why we need 120 days to pay for ads, freelancers and inventory,” says Nick. “So, when you have a team like Juni that understands how this works, you can easily fund your spend and get on with expanding your business.”
Your shipping strategy can be very different depending on where your customers are, so you need to know what’s expected from each region and adjust your plan accordingly. For example, there are some key differences between expectations in the US and the EU that will inform where you keep your inventory and how you ship.
US customers expect super fast shipping, so you need to think about how you store your inventory. “You have to have the stock you’re selling in the states,” says Nick.
If you can’t keep your stock in the states, the next best thing is making your shipping times as fast as possible.
“You need to ship to the US in under 7 days,” says Nick. “If you’re looking at more than that then it will be an issue and customer support will be hell.”
By contrast, EU customers are more tolerant of longer shipping times, so you may not need to change your inventory strategy, and can instead focus on finding a reliable shipping provider. “If you’re expanding to EU countries, especially from the US, you can get away with shipping being a bit above 7 days, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” says Nick.
“Expansion in a new market is essentially a brand launch, even if you’re doing tremendous revenue in the EU,” Nick explains.
As Nick mentioned in our previous article for DTC founders, brand launches should focus on two areas: your founder story and a good offer. This advice is especially true if you’re a European business looking to break the US, as customers there expect deals.
“You come to America, we want deals. There’s no way about this,” says Nick. “The offer has to be important for brand launches.”
Customers like to buy in bundles, and brands need to come with the right deals to catch consumer attention.
“An offer is the reason why they're going to buy, not the quality of the product, not the branding of the product, but a dollar amount of value that a customer will have,” says Nick. “For instance, we have straight sales, so you can buy just a normal pack from us, or you can subscribe and save 30% on any one of your orders. That offer is convincing enough for someone that might love the product.”
Once customers are through the door with deals, the quality of your product will speak for itself. You can also then make use of other tactics, like retargeting, email nurture, and building up brand loyalty.
“Expansion is distribution, and distribution is based on understanding the localised ways that things are operating. That starts with content and ads,” explains Nick. “Local language content and ads in local currency are the biggest and most important factors for growth.”
Localising content, especially at scale, can be challenging. If you’re scaling your ecommerce business across Europe you’ll be working with multiple languages. Translators aren’t always available to hire full time, and can also come at a big expense. Luckily, Nick has a cost-effective solution.
“The two things that AI does really well is make great content, and help you make more ads,” says Nick. “If you’ve already got the content from whatever country you’re in and run it through an AI tool – that’s instant expansion.”
However, Nick offers one important caveat: “AI will do a lot of the grunt work, but you still have to check it and put the brand elements to it. It’s enough to get you to 70%, but that unique final 30% is still human.”
An ideal strategy would use AI to localise your content and ads and hire a part time editor to do quality control and add that final human element.
When you’re entering a new market, you’ll need to run ads, pay suppliers like shipping companies, and manage an increased amount of transactions in different currencies. The right financial solution can make it simple to handle your spend without increasing your admin.
Juni offers the financial tools and intelligence to manage and ease cash flow and make smarter decisions faster. With products like multi-currency business accounts with low FX fees, capital solutions for cards and invoices, accounting automations and a centralised overview of your finances, you’ll have everything you need to manage a global digital commerce business.
“Juni will connect all of your financial information into one clear dashboard for you, so you can make business decisions quicker,” says Nick. “On the same platform, you can finance both your media spend and your inventory, and all of this is in one place!”
Expanding to new markets will mean building your brand recognition and tailoring your strategy to the demands of each new location. That means switching up your shipping strategy, considering offering promotional deals, and localising your content. Thankfully, there’s the tools available to help you localise your content and make payments without any hassle.
Building a multi-million dollar D2C brand is tough. Luckily, serial ecom entrepreneur Nick Shackelford has been there, done that, and agreed to tell you exactly how he does it in episode 2 of Unscripted Growth.
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