International Expansion of Business and the COVID19 Crisis
Here are three observations about the state of international expansion, trade, globalization and how they affect ecommerce store owners and online businesses.
1) Global Shipping Costs have Soared.
According to The Economist, "Flight cancellations have seen the cost of air freight, much of which goes in the belly of passenger jets, soar. Vaughn Moore of AIT Worldwide Logistics, a freight-forwarding company, reports that rates have risen from $2-3 per kilo to $9-11, which for some goods is prohibitively expensive." 1
OnGlobal Opinion: Now is not the time to expand international shipping.
OnGlobal Opinion: The best resource for COVID19's impact on shipping and logistics within Europe can be found on the SendCloud blog.
2) Good Global Data is Scarce.
For ecommerce store owners, individual product or SKU level data that's useful to drive business analysis or decisions is only now emerging. Data on international trade, which includes international expansion and globalization initiatives inside corporations of all sizes, is a lagging indicator at the best of times. It will take around another three months to know how this affects companies.
OnGlobal Opinion: Our recommended global data site is here: 2
3) Advertising Acquisition Costs (Paid Search) are Dropping
It's difficult to make a specific comment, but our anecdotal evidence shows costs for paid search are dropping. Now might be the time to ramp up Facebook or Adwords campaigns for audience building. Conversions have dropped for some industries.
Sources:
2) The COVID-19 World Commerce Impact report comes to us via the Ecommerce News Europe website and is a collaboration between Emarsys, a marketing software provider, and GoodData, an analytics software provider.
3) Wordstream's analysis was "based on a sample of 15,759 US-based WordStream client accounts in all verticals who were advertising on Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising between March 16 and March 31. Each industry includes at minimum 150 unique active clients. Accounts not recording at least 1 click or conversion are omitted from these figures. Shopping network data is omitted in industries with low usage. Average figures are median figures to account for outliers. All currency values are posted in USD." Wordstream.com
Disclosure: We're a partner of SendCloud, because we think they add value to European-based ecommerce companies. You can sign up for a SendCloud account here.