Internationalising your eCommerce starts with operations.

More than translating the website

Opening a new country is usually treated as a marketing decision: the store is translated, campaigns are adapted and the orders are expected to follow. That part matters, but it is only a fraction of the work. Most of it is operational, and it is the part that tends to be underestimated.

Tax, currencies, shipping, returns, customer service in another language and catalogue adaptation are tasks nobody sees from the outside but that decide whether internationalisation is profitable. If operations aren't ready, each international order creates more manual work than a domestic one, margins shrink and growth stalls.

Tax: VAT and the One-Stop Shop (OSS)

In the European Union, since July 2021, distance sales to consumers in other member states are taxed in the country of destination once a common threshold of €10,000 a year across all of them is exceeded. Above that threshold, every invoice must carry the buyer's country VAT rate, which varies from country to country and by product type.

To simplify returns there is the One-Stop Shop scheme, known as OSS, which lets you declare that VAT from a single country. But the One-Stop Shop doesn't remove the work of applying the right rate on every sale. Solving it with spreadsheets works for one country; with three it doesn't. The business system must apply taxes automatically according to each order's destination.

Several currencies in the same system

Selling in countries outside the eurozone, such as the Czech Republic, means working with prices, payments and accounts in several currencies. You need to decide whether prices are set in each currency or calculated from the euro, how they are updated and how exchange differences are recorded when payment arrives.

An ERP built to work in several currencies manages price lists per currency, exchange rates and differences when reconciling payments, without the team converting amounts by hand. It seems a minor detail until it is multiplied by hundreds of orders a month.

Logistics and carriers per market

Each country has its go-to carriers, usual lead times and costs. In some markets customers expect pick-up points; in others, delivery in one or two days. Choosing the right carrier for each market influences both the customer experience and the margin on each order.

Setting clear shipping rules per country, and letting the system allocate the right carrier and warehouse to each order automatically, avoids manual decisions order by order. It also lets you calculate precisely the real cost of serving each market, an essential figure for deciding where to keep growing.

Multilingual catalogue and content per country

An international catalogue needs translations, but also adaptation. Sizes, units of measure, regulations and, above all, the way customers search for each product change from one language to another. A literal translation rarely works as well as content designed for each market.

Managing content from a single source, with versions per language, avoids maintaining separate catalogues that end up out of sync. In the projects we work on, such as SEALS, with product information in 9 languages, or ADDITEQ, with content adapted to each European marketplace and market, the catalogue structure has been as important as the translation.

Returns and customer service

International returns are more expensive and slower than domestic ones, and in some sectors they are very frequent. It is worth defining each country's returns policy from the start, how products are collected and how stock and accounts are updated when they come back to the warehouse.

Customer service changes too. As well as the language, the team needs to see the real status of each order, shipment and return in the same system the warehouse uses. When that information is spread across several tools, answering a simple question about an order can take minutes that add up every day.

Why start with Central Europe

For many businesses based in Spain, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic are particularly attractive markets. They have mature eCommerce, high marketplace penetration and customers willing to buy from brands in other countries if the experience is good. They are also demanding markets in terms of delivery times, product information and customer service.

Precisely because they are demanding, these are markets where well-prepared operations make the difference. A well-translated catalogue, reliable stock and on-time shipping are basic requirements to compete. That's why we focus our work on businesses that want to grow in Spain and Central Europe.

Data to decide where to grow

Once several markets are open, the question changes: which one is worth investing more in? Answering it requires reliable data on sales, margins, returns and logistics costs per country. When that information lives in the ERP and is shown in up-to-date dashboards, management can decide where to keep growing with data, not impressions.

The second country is easier than the first

The good news is that the effort of preparing operations is made once. If the first international market is opened with tax, currencies, logistics and catalogue managed in the system, the second is an extension of something that already works. The third is simpler still.

If not, every new country multiplies complexity and manual work. That's why we recommend preparing operations before launch, not after the first problem. It is the difference between internationalising with control or with chaos. If you're thinking of opening new markets, a Marketplace Readiness Assessment will tell you what to prepare before you take the step.