7 December 2011
Hi Gabrielle

Yes, this is entirely possible.

In most cases it is a case of optimising the site for worldwide results and ensuring the site can take international orders, add international delivery rates etc.

We have developed e-commerce sites for many clients and have helped these clients achieve international sales and worldwide search engines listings.

Within our reviews on this site you can see some comments on this very subject.

A couple of good examples would be.

www.smithandstephenson.co.uk , this is a new site, only just gone live, but already comes up for the products they sell in search results across the whole world, for example search on Google for 'Hofdi Print Cushion' and they are right at the top of google worldwide.

www.bluelabelle.co.uk , this company built their own website but had no search engine presence at all, they hired us and after we modified their website they now hit the top spot on Google worldwide for terms such as 'botanical skin care oils'.

www.nowandagaindresshire.co.uk is another example of a site that comes up across Google worldwide for relevant terms such as 'mail order dress hire'

www.kathysgiftshop.co.uk is a quite new site but they send orders out all over the world to UK, Europe and USA simply because the site hits worldwide search results and is set up to deal with international orders.

If you would like a quote for similar results for your site please check out our reviews on this site, visit our website at www.theisleofwightcomputergeek.co.uk and then email me or give me a call.

Best Regards

Jamie

7 December 2011
Hello Gabriel,

What you are inquiring about is most definitely possible, as many company already do this. There is work that would be required to the back end of your site, you shopping cat, shipping and tax calculators. You may also want to take into consideration any possible language barriers, and may want to have your information available in a few others, this can greatly improve your sites visibility as well. It also pleases many when you take the time to make the site more inviting and comfortable for them to navigate, and providing the info in their language can do this.

Our company does custom SEO work on websites ( optimization) as well as offering services in other languages.

For more information, or to answer any other questions you may have, please feel free to contact us.

To visit our website and portfolio go to www.webfactorystudio.com

We would love to hear back from you.

15 December 2011
Hi Gabrielle

International ecommerce is something that many UK businesses are not considering at the moment when they really should be.

There are many considerations for internal ecommerce in terms of doing this the right way and great example of this is the ASOS website that target specific countries via www.asos.com.

It is noticeable that they are targeting countries that are at the forefront online at the moment in ecommerce adoption so this provides you with an immediate answer as to where they see their international marketplace. Therefore, it makes sense for you to consider where your international market might be before going forward. Your Analytical software should be able to help you with this and simple test would be to work out where most of you online conversion are coming from that are out with the UK?
ASOS recent Turnover was over £500 million; half of which came out with the UK which is impressive.

At Digital Six, we really do believe that international ecommerce is going to be one of the next big things with the emergence of other European and Asian countries adopting and conducting ecommerce online. There are many platforms available to allow you to set multiple versions of sites targeted to specific countries and we have looked at a few but the cost of these is fairly high for both developers and retailers.

International ecommerce has to be set-up in the right way so consider things like multichannel, multilingual and multicurrency set-up and what countries you are looking to target. Google translate exists but it is not great in terms of providing the correct tone or grammar for sites should a customer’s browse your website from a non English speaking country. Research indicates that if you get the translations right and set your website up to target the specific country i.e. using Country Code_top level domains i.e. .de, .fr etc, you re more likely to appear in the specific country search engines such as Google and more likely to actually to achieve sales as a result.

At Digital Six, we are currently developing our ecommerce software with all of this in mind and if you would like to discuss then happy to. 2012 should be a big year for us with international ecommerce at the forefront and we should have real time client examples of doing international ecommerce the right way.

Hope this helps

John
Digital Six

27 January 2012
Hi Gabrielle,

The best way to achieve this for maximum SEO impact and click-through-rates from search engine results pages, is to give each country it's own relevant .CO.UK, .FR, .COM.AU, DE, (etc) extension.

You can of course, use Google Webmasters to configure the site as an "international" .COM however this somewhat dilutes SEO and a French person will probably be looking for a .FR site in the SERPs, which reduces CTRs. If you do go down this route, then IP lookup for currency and language is probably worth considering so users don't need to select this on arrival (however you will need to ensure that search bots are not redirected).

If you find that TE Pro will not support this, it could be time to look for a bespoke solution that does what you want it to do, rather than try to fit your international business requirements around a restrictive platform.

Hope this is useful, and good luck!

Ed Tallents

16 Interactive.