Blueprint for Building a Global Commerce Site

This article was originally featured on eCommerce Times

Building a successful global business is a never-ending juggling act. With what can seem like an unlimited number of moving parts, compromises feel inevitable. Efficiency is traded for simplicity. Optimal long-term solutions are traded for quick and dirty fixes.

These tradeoffs can be especially problematic for eCommerce businesses. Before you know it, what was once a sensible decision to ramp up a new country on its own platform has snowballed into 10 different websites running out of 10 different codebases—each one its own tangled web of custom features, add-ons, and designs. Inefficiencies such as these aren't just theoretical problems. Significant additional overhead is required just to manage the code, catalog, and IT needs of each site. With more points for failure, the risk of downtime is increased. Plus, conflicts in data or content can hurt your brand's experience.

At Avatria, we've worked with numerous global businesses who've come to us for help with their global sites. Each time, we've made the same recommendation: to get the most of your global eCommerce business, it's critical to internationalize your website. Our approach is to help clients build a single platform that can support every country in which they operate, and eliminate the overhead, headache, and hassle of a disparate setup. We've developed a framework to assist with the internationalization process, assuring that the optimal long-term solution makes sense in the short- and medium-term as well.

Read on to learn what makes our approach so effective, and key considerations you should make when starting your own internationalization initiative.

Key Tenets

When advising a client who's embarking on an internationalization initiative, our first aim is to establish the principles that will guide the rest of our work. Doing so drives home the reasons for our approach, and will inform key decisions to be made in strategy and execution.

Our three key tenets of internationalization are consistency, repeatability, and simplicity.

Consistency

The biggest benefit gained from consolidating a network of global sites into a single internationalized platform is the consistency gained. With a single central platform, it's much easier to assure that all of your sites follow best practices, and maintain consistent brand standards, messaging, and experiences. Your eCommerce managers and merchandisers can manage multiple storefronts without needing to jump back and forth between different platforms, improving efficiency and productivity. We've even seen clients move to a regional management model due to the advantages gained.

Also, customers who may interact with multiple sites will appreciate the improvement in experience, helping to assure that you keep their business. You can still create country-specific features as needed, but having a single standard will reduce customer confusion and improve your management capabilities.

Repeatability

Typically, an internationalization project isn't centered around just a single country. While you may choose to start with a single country (more on this later), it's highly likely that others will follow, whether in the short term (countries in which you already have a presence) or long term (countries you hope to expand into). As such, designing a highly repeatable process offers multiple benefits. For one, it provides valuable flexibility. If your process is built to be repeatable, you won't feel pressured to overload the initial release, potentially speeding up development and reducing risk. You can launch additional countries on a timeline that works best for your team, which will help reduce mistakes as you learn from each iteration, and fine-tune the process.

Simplicity

To make the process as simple and efficient as possible, we strongly recommend that clients pursuing an internationalization initiative follow an MVP approach. Do only what is necessary, and iterate from there. This should not be treated as an opportunity to build and release new features that aren't required for international sites.

Ultimately, the goal of a central internationalization platform is to make the management of your global online presence a business process rather than an IT one. Doing so will bring down the cost of bringing a new country online, and decrease your time to market after the initial implementation. We take the difficult work and do it upfront, while the time is available, to reduce the number of hard decisions you'll have to make down the line.

Considerations

Once you've defined the goals of your internationalization project, you can get down to the finer details. Below are some key considerations you should make when developing your strategy, to assure that implementation goes as smoothly as possible.

Features

One of the most valuable behaviors you can take at the beginning of an internationalization project is to document the key features that exist across your sites. This should include all current features as well as anything planned. Understanding your full set of requirements up front is crucial, as it will help make your design and development process efficient and consistent. Instead of customizing the site for each individual case, you can identify duplicate needs and find solutions that fit into existing plans and guidelines.

Think ahead to future countries as well—investing the time and effort now will reduce the load with each subsequent rollout. This allows releases to occur much quicker, which your business stakeholders will often expect.

Currency, Content, and Language

Likewise, it's valuable to take stock early on of all requirements surrounding currency, content, and language. How your sites will differ from each other in these ways can have fundamental impacts ranging from how various data is maintained to how payment will be captured from country to country, like the different types of online payment methods accepted across South America. In turn these items may impact other business processes and can provide challenges with content authoring, data feeds, integration, reconciliation, or other areas.

Similarly, it's crucial to understand who you're selling to, as different countries can have very different rules and needs. Do you need to worry about local privacy regulations like GDPR in Europe? Are you operating in a country like China, which has requirements about data storage? What languages will your content need to be be presented in, like the requirements for French and English in Canada? Will you translate variations of the same content, or will you localize content on a country-by-country basis? Keep in mind that different countries may use variations of the same language—which will you support? All of these questions can have tremendous impacts on the organization, structure and functionality across your internationalized platform.

Data Model and Catalog

While all of these considerations are key, few are more impactful than getting your data model right the first time. Start by understanding what data is shared between countries, what data is different and what teams are responsible for that data. From there, you can design a master data structure that reflects the needs of your ecosystem. When done right, (which may include inheritance models at country or regional levels) you can save your teams significant time and energy. You'll be investing the time and effort for this one way or another, so do you want to put in the work up front now, or require a lot more later?

Governance

The bigger your global reach, the more internal stakeholders are likely to be involved. We all know how this can cause problems, so make sure to define who owns what up front. You may want to enforce certain features or content at a global level to ensure consistency, whereas others may be left to local control for greater flexibility.

Deployments and Maintenance

Running your global site on a single platform can have major performance implications, especially when it comes to downtime, resource intensive processes (such as search indexing, data processing and catalog syndication), and general maintenance activities. Remember, one team's "overnight" processing may be another team's peak business hours. The right plan should minimize the business impact of these activities on all parties.

Rollout Plan

No matter what your reach looks like, the first country you release will always present the biggest learning curve. Since this will likely take the longest , we recommend picking a smaller country to break the ice. This will help reduce the time before rollout, and reduce the risk of any errors you may make. Once you've effectively piloted your first country, look to develop a rollout plan that will allow you to efficiently and strategically launch your remaining sites. Due to regional inter-dependencies, you may not always have the luxury of going country by country, so focus on ways to split up the remainder into groups to reduce risk.

Conclusion

We know, it can be intimidating to think about the effort required to properly internationalize your global eCommerce presence. But don't forget that your current system has its own costs, too. We like to say that maintaining a separate network of global sites is a bit like the iceberg fallacy: you may think you know what you're up against, but there are major invisible costs, issues, and inefficiencies just below the surface. With the right partner by your side, embarking on an internationalization initiative should be smooth sailing, now and for years to come. Avatria has experience guiding Fortune 500 businesses through their own internationalization efforts. For more information on how we can help, contact us.