Global shipping giant FedEx commissioned Forrester Research to take a look at the present state of global e-shopping and e-shoppers. They released the white paper “Seizing the Cross-Border Opportunity: How Small and Medium Sized Businesses Can Go Global” in December 2014.

Forrester’s study yielded three key findings:

1. Cross-border eCommerce is a major revenue opportunity for small and medium-size enterprises
2. SMEs must differentiate by offering unique merchandise while providing world-class service.
3. Limited variability in global shopper preferences means SMEs don’t need drastically different regional eCommerce strategies.

Forrester researchers conducted an in-depth survey of 9,006 global online shoppers. These online shoppers reported that the two most common ways the discovered shop outside their own countries was: Search Engines and Online Advertising. Word of mouth was mentioned followed while Social Media and Email Promotions rounded out the top five. However with Latin American shoppers Social Media and Email were disproportionally more utilized.

Here are online retail sales numbers by country for 2014 as well as projected sales for 2018.

The report concludes with a number of recommendations for small and medium sized e-commerce merchants.  Alternative Payments finds s familiar link between our international payment clients and some of the reports final notes.

“A large number of merchants interviewed started their cross-border business unintentionally, as international customers found them through easily accessible methods such as web search and online ads.” This is something that many merchants have told us. Once they took the time to study their international traffic and business. They found they could take a few easy steps such as; adding local payments types, and including currency and shipping options, to reap more from these international visitors.

You can download the whitepaper from FedEx.com at this link “Seizing the Cross-Border Opportunity: How Small and Medium Sized Businesses Can Go Global”