In the age of the internet, your business may be global and you might be missing a real opportunity! In this article we want to explore how your business large or small might be international and how you can benefit from it… and how to help ensure you take advantage of the opportunities offered to you.

There are millions of people on the internet, all over the globe. And many of them are in need of the service or product your business offers. They might be in your town, or they might be in Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe or the Americas.

Perhaps your biggest market may not be where you think it is. Maybe there is a whole group of people that need your business that are geographically separate from you. Your next customer might be coming from the internet; is your website AND your business ready for that?

A good first question is this, can you actually deliver your product or service to someone overseas?

Do you have the processes and service partnerships in place to deliver a product (service) to someone buying overseas? Can you process an Indian credit card? Do you have a courier company that will deliver to Samoa? Do you have staff (or business partners) that can liaise with customers who don’t speak English?

The next question is, could someone who does not speak English use your website?

Do you have your website in English only? Do you have a french, German or Japanese version of your site? If you are trying to be international, does your website shopping cart cope with different currencies, languages, etc.? If you have a online service, can your service run in different languages.

So how do you get started?
Well, you can start by using something like Google Translate to machine translate your website. This won’t give a great translation, but will at least allow people from a different language to navigate your website. A better method is to have actual different language versions of the site created, so that search engines can index your site in your potential new customers language.

Next you might look at fuller Internationalization and Localisation features in the code behind your website.

What else? The most important thing is that if you bring in customers from overseas, you can serve them properly. This will need you to implement procedures in the office and with your partners to ensure that you can process an order, deliver the service and deal with any communication you need to do with the customer.

Need help?

As a widely experienced firm, we can help you with both the technical side and the practicalities of the office procedures.