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Hey. In this video, we’ll explain the process of international product deliveries, how to choose shipping partners, and the importance of post-sales customer service and support.
If you’ve ever made an online purchase, you’ve experienced product delivery—or order fulfillment—in action. From the customer perspective, you simply visit a website, select a product, give the merchant your payment and shipping information. Then wait for your order to arrive. Afterwards, if you have any issues, you contact the business for assistance.
As a business, you’ll follow a similar process as you expand into international markets—but now you’ve got borders to deal with, currencies to exchange, possible returns to handle, and more customers to support.
Imagine ordering a product from a business in another country, but you receive the wrong item. What happens if you’re unable to communicate with the business, or you’re unable to return it back across borders?
You’d be quite an unhappy customer.
As a business owner, you can avoid this scenario with the proper preparation. Let’s look at some things to consider for international deliveries. Let’s say you own a vintage record shop. The new reissue of The Beatles’ Revolver on vinyl has become so popular there’s a run on orders.
Let’s have a look at your inventory and supply chain process. You’ll want to monitor demand and ensure your products are adequately stocked so you can fulfill orders as they come in. And as your orders are received, they’ll need to be shipped in a timely manner according to the promised delivery dates.
Have you thought about your ability to ship, and the time and costs involved? Shipping across borders may involve extra costs that you’ll need to factor into your pricing model.
Now let’s think about shipping partners. Not all shipping companies have access to all markets, so you’ll want to partner with a reliable cross-border shipping company or agency.
Some cross-border shipping partners may have better access to certain markets, as well as the ability to collect and pay import or customs taxes on your behalf.
Your shipping company—or companies, if needed—can also advise you on packaging and labelling for shipping across borders.
Be sure to explore all your options. Reliable shipping partners can truly drive your success when orders are shipped accurately and received in a timely manner. Even when a customer has successfully received his order, your job isn’t finished. This post-sales period can be a crucial time for your business as you try to cultivate this one-time customer into a loyal, repeat buyer.
What happens if your customers in other markets need to return or exchange their purchase? How will your business handle exchanges? How will you process refunds? It’s really important to provide clear, up front instructions to your customers about the policies and processes involved in refunds or exchanges.
No matter where they’re located, customers expect prompt and friendly service. You can provide support online or via the telephone, but either way, you want your customers to be able to contact you directly.
As you put these processes in place, be mindful not only of language differences, but possible cultural differences as well, so that you provide the best possible customer service, during and after a sale. To sum up:
Before offering product delivery to international customers, think about your inventory and supply chain, cross-border shipping, and customer support—no matter what their location.
When you take the time to properly adapt your process, you’ll be setting up your business for international success.
Conversion Optimization
The process of improving your digital strategy in order to increase the percentage of visitors who complete your goals. E.g. “Once I add a new line of faux finishes to my website, I’m going to start focusing on conversion optimization.”
Conversion
The action you want visitors to perform. Examples include ecommerce purchases, form submissions, phone calls, and video views. E.g. “My main goal is for people to book a consultation on my website, but signing up for my email newsletter would also be considered a conversion.”
Actual Cost-per-Click (CPC)
The true amount that a business pays to the search engine when their ad is clicked. Businesses set a Max CPC which acts as a “ceiling”—they can never be charged more than that figure. However, depending on the number and relevance of the other ads in the auction, the actual amount paid can vary. The formula for cost-per-click may vary slightly across search engines, but generally works like this: (Ad Rank to Beat ÷ Your Relevance Score) + £0.01. Let’s see an example. Your competitor, Wanda’s Weddings, has the next-best Ad Rank is (that’s the Ad Rank to beat in this formula). Her Ad Rank is 12. Now we need to divide that by your relevance score. Let’s say you’ve scored a 9 out of possible 10. So, your actual cost-per-click will be (1 2/9) + £ 0.01, or £ 1.34. E.g. “I’m willing to bid as high as £1.75 for my wedding photos ad, but luckily my actual CPC is only £1.60.”
Goal
The action you want visitors to perform. Examples include ecommerce purchases, form submissions, phone calls, and video views. E.g. “My main goal is for people to book a consultation on my website, but signing up for my email newsletter would also be considered a conversion.”
CTR
The number of times people click on an item of interest, like an advert, in comparison to the number of times users are exposed to that item. E.g.: “My clickthrough rate on ads about external painting is 2%, but my CTR on ads about indoor murals is less than 1%.”
Anchor Text
The visible or clickable part of a link on a web page. E.g. “If you click the link whose anchor text says ‘Organic Produce photo gallery,’ you’ll be directed to the page with more photos of our fruits and vegetables.”
Visit
A group of interactions that take place on your website within a given time frame. For example, a single session can contain multiple page views and ecommerce transactions. E.g.“My website got 2,000 visits last month, but what I really care about is whether those visits resulted in sales.”
Desktop
A nonmobile computer. E.g. “I prefer to use a desktop at home, but when I travel I use my laptop.”
Backlink
Any link incoming into a page or website from another page or website. E.g. “Our blog posts are very popular and filled with useful information, so we have loads of backlinks to them from other websites.”
Click Through Rate (CTR)
The number of times people click an item of interest, like an advert, in comparison to the number of times people are exposed to that item. For example, if your ad received 100 impressions and 3 clicks, your CTR is 3%. CTR is a crucial indicator of whether your ads are relevant to the people using the search engine—think of it as the difference between the amount of people actually coming into your shop divided by the amount of people stopping outside to look through the window. While there are no specific guidelines, you should always be working toward improving CTR. E.g. “I improved my CTR quite a bit when I added pricing info to my Wedding Photos ad—that clearly made more people want to click through.”
Ranking
A listing’s position on a search engine results page. E.g. “With a lot of work, I’m hoping to get my website to the #1 ranking on search engines for my relevant keywords and audience.”
Title Element
The title of a web page as indicated in the HTML of a page. Also often used as the title of your page in a search engine results page. E.g. “I pay careful attention to the title element of my web pages, to help search engines understand what the pages are about.”
Destination Page
The page being linked to from another page. E.g. “If you click the link to “Gallery,” you’ll see a destination page chock full of images of our fruits and vegetables.
Search Engine Marketing
A form of advertising that allows you to bid for your advertisement to show along with search results for keywords that people are typing in. This lets businesses be seen by people at the very moment they’re searching for the things a business offers. E.g. “SEO is a long process, but using SEM helped me get a lot more website traffic really quickly.”
Virtual Reality
Computer-generated simulation of a three-dimensional environment with which you can interact using equipment such as headsets, sensors or joysticks.
SEO
The practice of making changes to web pages, content, and the promotion of that content to improve visibility in the organic —or unpaid—search engine results. E.g. “Investing in SEO helped my website get a higher ranking in search engine results.”
Average Ad Position
The position of your ad on the search engine results page (SERP). Search engines typically denote the highest position as “Position 1.” If your ad appears half the time in Position 1, and half the time in Position 2, your Average Position would be 1.5. E.g. “My average ad position for my pet photos ad improved from 7 to 3—I’m thrilled!”
Browser
A computer program used to navigate the Internet on computers, tablets and smartphones. Examples include Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. E.g. “I’m not sure why my website looks different depending on the browser a person is using.”
Cost per conversion
Often referred to as cost per acquisition (CPA), this ratio measures how much money you spend on advertising relative to the number of conversions received from the ads. For example, if you spend £100 and receive 4 conversions, your cost per conversion is £25. Your cost per conversion should be lower than the value of a conversion. For example, if a conversion is only worth £20, then a £25 cost per conversion is not profitable. E.g. “My cost per conversion was too high, so I started spending a little less on online advertising and reviewed how I could improve my ads for future campaigns.”
Cost per Click
The amount of money required to produce a single click on a digital advertisement. E.g. “Cost per click prices seem to be higher during weekends, so I’m only running my campaigns during the week.”
Traffic Acquisition
The process of attracting visitors—often referred to as traffic to websites, mobile apps and other digital assets. E.g. “My acquisition strategy focuses on targeting people who have recently bought old houses.”
Chatbot
A computer program that simulates human conversation often over the Internet. E.g. “We created a chatbot to answer common customer questions and help with customer service.”
Keyword
The specific term a user searched for before they reached your website. E.g. “The keywords “luxury romantic getaway” are performing great for my site.”
Ad Extensions
Optional extra information that can be displayed below a search ad. E.g. “We added sitelink ad extensions to our ads, giving our customers extra options to click through to on our site.”
URL
The unique address of a page or piece of digital content on the Internet. E.g. “Max, you can access my website by typing the URL into your browser.”
Ad Network
A platform connecting advertisers with publishers who want to host their ads. The advertiser pays the network every time an agreed event takes place, such as an ad impression, a click or a sale. The network then shares the revenue generated from the advertiser with the publisher, after deducting the network fees. E.g. “We chose an ad network for our display campaigns, so we could get our ads out to a wide range of websites quickly.”
Internal Links
Links from one page to another page within the same website. E.g. “Website visitors can click on internal links on the homepage to see the web pages in my fruits and vegetable gallery section.”
Search Engine Optimization
The practice of making changes to web pages, content, and the promotion of that content to improve visibility in the organic —or unpaid—search engine results. E.g. “Investing in SEO helped my website get a higher ranking in search engine results.”
XMP Sitemap
A listing of web pages on your site that helps search engines understand your website. E.g. “Adding a sitemap helped search engines understand the pages on www.blakeproduce.com.”
Ecommerce
The sale of products and services online.
Content
The digital material available to users, via text, video, audio, images, etc. E.g. “I’m adding more image and video content to my site, so it’ll be more engaging.”
User-Generated Content
Content created by users of an online platform such as videos, comments or posts. E.g. “Most social networks rely on user-generated content for posting and sharing.”
Link Building
The process of encouraging high-quality, relevant incoming links to a website through the creation of unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. E.g. “Because our content is relevant and engaging, other websites are more likely to link through to our pages, thus helping our link-building efforts to improve our search engine positions.”
Home Page
The introductory or “main” page of a website. E.g. “On my home page, visitors can see examples of my most beautifully painted houses.”
SEM
A form of advertising that allows you to bid for your advertisement to show along with search results for keywords that people are typing in. This lets businesses be seen by people at the very moment they’re searching for the things a business offers. E.g. “SEO is a long process, but using SEM helped me get a lot more website traffic really quickly.”
Sitemap
A listing of web pages on your site that helps search engines understand your website. E.g. “Adding a sitemap helped search engines understand the pages on www.blakeproduce.com.”
Crawler
A program designed to systematically browse content on the Internet and collect information about it to help searchers find what they’re looking for. E.g. “I’m scared of spiders, but not the ones that help my website appear in search engines.”
Conversion Rate
The ratio of conversions to visits, often used to measure digital performance. E.g. “I’m not sure why, but my conversion rate on external painting is very low for male visitors.”
Blog
A regularly updated website with posts written by an individual or a business, typically in a conversational style and focused on a specific subject.
Landing Page
The first page on a website that a person usually sees—not necessarily the home page of that website. E.g. “I’m directing people who click my ad to a landing page with a discount coupon so that these visitors will be encouraged to buy.”
Banner Ad
A form of advert found on web pages and mobile applications, available in a variety of formats (such as images, animated GIFs and rich media). E.g. “I’m using banner ads to bring new customers to my website.”
Web Spam
Techniques that try to cheat their way to the top of search results, like repeating keywords, paying other sites to link to yours, or putting invisible text on the screen. This is considered bad form because truly relevant websites get buried in the results. E.g. “I received email offers to rank first in Google search results but have turned them down because the techniques used are spam.”
Analytics
The analysis of data generated by people’s activity on websites or mobile apps, for the purpose of discovering ways to improve websites and marketing campaigns. E.g. “I’m using a web analytics tool to understand how to improve certain web pages with the goal of increasing customer engagement on my website.”
Ad Rank
The overall “score” an ad receives that determines where it can appear on a search results page (SERP). Higher Ad Rank leads to higher positions on the SERP. The formula for Ad Rank varies slightly across search engines, but generally works like this: Max CPC X Quality Score. For example, an ad with a Max CPC of £2 a nd a relevance score of 6/10 will have an Ad Rank of 12. If this is the highest Ad Rank, this ad wins the top position on the SERP. E.g. “Improving my adverts’ relevance and increasing my bid helped me improve my Ad Rank.”
Impressions
The number of times an advert is displayed. E.g. “My new marketing campaign for home-baked dog treats received thousands of impressions, but I’m not sure if I’ve made any sales yet.”
Click
When a person visits your site via an ad. For most SEM campaigns, you only pay when the searcher clicks your ad. E.g. “My ‘Cute Puppy Photos’ ad gets substantially more clicks than my ‘Cute Kitty Photos’ ad.”
Redirect
An automatic forward to a different URL than the one entered by the user. E.g. “We implemented redirects when we moved the website to a new domain.”
Index
A searchable catalogue of web pages and digital content used by a search engine to provide relevant results. E.g. “Before my site appeared in the search engine’s index, people couldn’t find my website when they searched for foyer murals.”
Uniform Resource Locator
The unique address of a page or piece of digital content on the Internet. E.g. “Max, you can access my website by typing the URL into your browser.”
Unique Visitor
A single visitor to a website during a specific period of time. E.g. “No matter how many times Uncle Bob visits my website, he’ll still count as one unique visitor.”
Spam
Techniques that try to cheat their way to the top of search results, like repeating keywords, paying other sites to link to yours, or putting invisible text on the screen. This is considered bad form because truly relevant websites get buried in the results. E.g. “I received email offers to rank first in Google search results but have turned them down because the techniques used are spam.”
Bid Price
Your maximum cost-per-click (CPC), or bid price, is the highest amount that you are willing to pay for 1 click on your ad. However, you will not necessarily be charged the full Max CPC. For example, if your Max CPC is £1.25, you may only pay £1.04 for the click, depending on competitive factors. However, raising a bid might increase the likelihood of a higher ad position on the search engine results page. E.g. “I’ll bid as high as £2.25, but that’s my max CPC—I’m not made of money!”
Social Network
A community of individuals creating and sharing content. E.g. “Social networks could be a good place for me to showcase my beautiful foyer murals and maybe get new customers.”
Advert
A sponsored result that appears on a search engine results page, or SERP. Ads are typically formed from a few lines of text, and may include additional elements like a street address, reviews and phone numbers. E.g. “My ‘Beautiful Wedding Photos’ ad is already bringing in tons of new business.”
Application
A program designed to run on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. E.g. “My house needs painting, so I used a local app to find a reputable service near me.”
Natural Listings
Results from a search engine that are not paid adverts. E.g. “The higher my website ranks in a search engine’s natural listings, the more website traffic I’ll get.”
Ad
A sponsored result that appears on a search engine results page, or SERP. Ads are typically formed from a few lines of text, and may include additional elements like a street address, reviews and phone numbers. E.g. “My ‘Beautiful Wedding Photos’ ad is already bringing in tons of new business.”
Meta Keywords
A short list of several words that succinctly describe the content of a page. Not used by any search engine. E.g. “I don’t worry about including meta keywords on my web pages, as search engines do not use this information.”
Impression
The number of times an advertisement is displayed; it doesn’t necessarily mean someone clicked on it. E.g. “I’m getting a lot of impressions on my Baby Photos ad, but not many people are clicking—I may need to rewrite it.”
PPC
An advertising system in which advertisers pay for users to click on their advertisements. E.g. “I’m going to use payperclick adverts to promote my new faux finishes.”
Social Media
Content such as text, images, or videos, created by individuals and shared across the Internet. E.g. “Social media changes all the time, so I hired someone to help me create a social media strategy.”
SERP
A list of results appearing in a search engine in response to a user’s search query. E.g. “After I searched for ‘buy high gloss paint in bulk’ I noticed that the SERP had both natural listings and paid listings.”
UGC
Content created by users of an online platform such as videos, comments or posts. E.g. “Most social networks rely on user-generated content for posting and sharing.”
White Hat
Tactics that optimise web pages for users, not for search engines. E.g. “I only use white hat tactics to help search engines find my website www.blakeproduce.com.”
Bid Management Software
Software that can be used to automatically manage a search campaign, often to pre-set rules.
Black Hat
Manipulative or deceptive SEO tactics that optimise only for search engines and not for users. E.g. “I was especially careful to avoid any black hat SEO techniques; I didn’t want to hurt the ranking of www.mydeliciousorganicveggies.com in search engines.”
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language. A language used by web developers to create websites. E.g. “My website was written using HTML.”
Link
A text or image that provides a link from one web page or website to another. E.g. “When a major home decor blog linked to my website, I got a lot more visitors.”
Content Marketing
Creating online content such as blogs, videos or infographics to attract and engage a defined audience.
Search Engine
A tool that indexes and returns relevant digital content in response to users’ keywords. Popular Internet search engines include Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Yandex and more. E.g. “I use search engines to look for trends in home decor.”
Search Term
The keyword or phrase a user types into a search engine in order to find what they’re looking for. E.g. “When people use the search term ‘hairdresser’ they might be looking for tips on how to do it themselves or a service to do it for them.”
Algorithm
A set of rules used by computers to solve problems. Search engines use algorithms to determine the rankings of a page for a specific search query. E.g. “I hope search engine algorithms match my relevant web pages with my desired audience.”
ROI
A calculation an advertiser uses to try to identify if their online marketing campaigns are profitable. One common formula used for calculating ROI is the following: return on investment = (gain from investment – cost of investment) / cost of investment. E.g. “The sales driven by our display advertising campaigns have demonstrated positive ROI this quarter”.
Organic Listings
Results from a search engine that are not paid adverts. E.g. “The higher my website ranks in a search engine’s natural listings, the more website traffic I’ll get.”
Bot
A program designed to browse the content on the Internet and collect information about it to help searchers find what they’re looking for. E.g. “When I launched my website, I made sure that the pages were visible to search engine bots, so they could index my pages.”
ALT Text
Text used in the code of a page to describe an image. If an image is broken and can not be loaded by the page, the ALT text appears in a blank box that would normally contain the image. ALT text is also used by screen readers to improve accessibility for blind and visually impaired people, to tell them what is on the image. E.g. “The homepage of my website www.blakeproduce.com features an image of a fruit and vegetable garden. I included the following ALT text in the image code to describe it: ‘Fresh fruit and vegetables picked from Blake Produce gardens.”
Vlog
The video version of a blog, where updates are new videos rather than written posts.
PayPerClick
An advertising system in which advertisers pay for users to click on their advertisements. E.g. “I’m going to use payperclick adverts to promote my new faux finishes.”
Clickthrough Rate
The number of times people click on an item of interest, like an advert, in comparison to the number of times users are exposed to that item. E.g.: “My clickthrough rate on ads about external painting is 2%, but my CTR on ads about indoor murals is less than 1%.”
Max CPC
Your maximum cost-per-click (CPC), or bid price, is the highest amount that you are willing to pay for 1 click on your ad. However, you will not necessarily be charged the full Max CPC. For example, if your Max CPC is £1.25, you may only pay £1.04 for the click, depending on competitive factors. However, raising a bid might increase the likelihood of a higher ad position on the search engine results page. E.g. “I’ll bid as high as £2.25, but that’s my max CPC—I’m not made of money!”
Return on Investment
A calculation an advertiser uses to try to identify if their online marketing campaigns are profitable. One common formula used for calculating ROI is the following: return on investment = (gain from investment – cost of investment) / cost of investment. E.g. “The sales driven by our display advertising campaigns have demonstrated positive ROI this quarter”.
Meta Description
The description of a web page included in the code of the page. May also be used as a part of the description in the search engine results page. E.g. “I write meta descriptions for each page of my website in case the search engine displays the page in the search results.”
Search Engine Results Page
A list of results appearing in a search engine in response to a user’s search query. E.g. “After I searched for ‘buy high gloss paint in bulk’ I noticed that the SERP had both natural listings and paid listings.”
Web Analytics Tools
The analysis of data generated by people’s activity on websites or mobile apps, for the purpose of discovering ways to improve websites and marketing campaigns. E.g. “I’m using a web analytics tool to understand how to improve certain web pages with the goal of increasing customer engagement on my website.”
Quality Score
A measure from 1 to 10 of how relevant your ads and landing pages are to the keywords you’re bidding on. Improving your Quality Score can help you achieve better ad positions and lower prices for clicks.
App
A program designed to run on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. E.g. “My house needs painting, so I used a local app to find a reputable service near me.”
Spider
A program designed to systematically browse content on the Internet and collect information about it to help searchers find what they’re looking for. E.g. “I’m scared of spiders, but not the ones that help my website appear in search engines.”
Duplicate Content
Content that it is similar or identical to content found on another website. Search engines tend to ignore duplicate content. E.g. “We avoid duplicate content by investing in original content.”
Geo-targeting
Use geo-targeting to only show ads to people in a certain geographical area. E.g. “We adjusted our geo-targeting to only show our ads to people within 50 miles of our business.”
Session
A group of interactions that take place on your website within a given time frame. For example, a single session can contain multiple page views and ecommerce transactions. E.g.“My website got 2,000 visits last month, but what I really care about is whether those visits resulted in sales.”
Paid Listings
Advertisements that appear on search engines results pages. E.g. “I’m thinking about paying to have my website appear in the paid listings, so that I can bring more customers to my website.”
Email Marketing
The process of using email messages to share information and promote products and services.
Query
The keyword or phrase a user types into a search engine in order to find what they’re looking for. E.g. “When people use the search term ‘hairdresser’ they might be looking for tips on how to do it themselves or a service to do it for them.”
Search Query
The full, exact word or phrase that a person types into a search engine in order to find what they’re looking for. It may or may not exactly match the keywords advertisers are targeting. E.g. “The search term ‘pet photographer Cardiff’ is performing well for me every month.”
Display URL
The URL that is shown on the ad, often a shortened version of the actual or destination URL. E.g. “So that my users don’t see a long url, like “http://www.blakeproduce.com/proucts/specials/italiantomatos.com”, I use a url shortner service like https://goo.gl/, which allows me to create a shorter, more user-friendly display url for use in social media updates.”
Avatar
An image used to represent a person, business or organisation on social media. E.g. “When I click on my avatar it brings me back to my profile.”
Key learnings
You might have all your systems in place to accept international orders. But can you deliver your products accurately and on time? What about customer service and support? Are you prepared to handle refunds and exchanges across borders? In this video, we'll explore:
- processes involved in deliveries
- choosing reliable shipping partners and services
- post-sales customer service and support.