If you have a business that sells products online, and you currently focus only on selling in your own country, it can be a good idea to consider broadening your marketing and sales approaches to bring in more potential business from the EU as a whole. After all, one of the main reasons the EU exists is to make it easier for people in different member countries to trade with each other. If a product range or service is doing well in your country, there are likely to be similar markets elsewhere in the EU that you could be harnessing.
Of course, it takes a little research and preparation to get ready to start openly welcoming customers from other member states. Here are some things to do:
Ensure You Can Sell in Compliance With EU Regulations and Can Handle Things Like Tax Using The Latest PrestaShop Update
Before you can begin selling to people in other countries, you’ll need to make sure your site is equipped to do things like currency conversions for pricing, handle different taxes, add on different shipping and handling costs for people in different locations (obviously this is not applicable for digitally delivered products like downloadable software and media or eBooks), and is compliant with EU trade regulations. This may seem a bit of an overwhelming thing to have to add to your site’s back end, but actually it can be done very simply. If you install ecommerce platform PrestaShop, you’ll find that the latest version has a whole module geared towards making EU compliance and EU wide sales easy to manage, and ensuring you’re doing everything right.
Research Different EU Markets
The EU is pretty diverse, and the markets vary quite a lot. As has been in the news a lot recently, some countries are in a better economic state than others, and also, different things tend to be in fashion or important to people in different member states. This means that before you start marketing in other EU countries, you should do some research to establish where your products are going to sit well with the consumer public, and if you can find a gap in the country’s own market to sell in. The web is full of resources and stats that can help you learn more about different markets, so spend some time looking at those that interest you and prioritise countries for marketing.
Translations
A final thing to consider is how you will handle copy, such as advertising and product descriptions. You will of course need translations, but as well as this, consider if you need to actually change things like your trading name or logo to appeal more in other countries. Translation only takes into account language, but if you really appear to care about a country’s culture and understand the market, you will do far better.
By readying your business and website in these ways, you can soon begin tapping into huge markets all over Europe!