According to the report entitled The 21st Century Spice Trade: A Guide to the Cross-Border E-Commerce OpportunityOnline, DHL Express considers that retailers are also boosting sales by 10-15% on average by extending their offering to international customers.
An additional boost comes from including a premium service offering: retailers and manufacturers that incorporated a faster shipping option into their online stores grew 1.6 times faster on average than other players.
Manufacturers are taking advantage of ecommerce to move to direct retail models – bypassing the ‘middleman’ and offering their products online to the end customer – and expect to grow 30% faster in cross-border ecommerce than other retailer groups.
The main challenges highlighted by consumers to cross-border purchases relate to logistics, trust, price and customer experience. The report noted that the ecommerce trend has given birth to a new eco-system of facilitators and off-the-shelf solutions (such as payment providers and programs that localise a website’s check-out experience for the visitor), helping retailers to adapt their offering to the digital world and to transact with customers in foreign markets.
Global logistics partners can provide support in identifying the right trade-off between centralized and local warehousing and fulfillment, while fast, reliable and flexible delivery options can be an important tool in turning speculative interest into long-term customer loyalty.
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