A Shopify Plus publication

Global Commerce Toolkit

How To Scale
Your Global
Business
Your Guide to the Tools and Support High-Growth
Brands Use to Get Ahead Internationally

Last modified
07/2022
How To Scale Your Global Business

Contents
Introduction 3

Getting to know your international customers 4

Mine your multi-store data 4
Care for every customer 5
Level up your multi-language techniques 6

Making your supply chain more sustainable 7

Reduce your carbon footprint 7
Make product packaging recyclable, compostable, or reusable 8
Hold your business accountable to sustainability goals 9
Manage international reverse logistics 9

Using automation to prevent fraud, boost efficiency, and accelerate growth 10

Ecommerce automation 10
Supply chain automation 11
Marketing automation 11

How Shopify can help 12

Shopify Markets, Shopify Shipping, and Shopify Payments 12
Shopify Flow 12
Shop Pay 13
Planet app 13

Merchant spotlight: Paperlike 14

Scaling confidently with Shopify Plus 15

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How To Scale Your Global Business

Introduction
You've launched. You've expanded. Now you need to sustain your
business' international presence.

Robust data management and a smooth supply chain are the backbones of
doing ecommerce at scale, and harnessing the power of automation will help
you do both—while giving your shoppers a stand-out customer experience.

This guide will show you how.

Introduction

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How To Scale Your Global Business

Getting to know
your international
customers
Mine your multi-store data
To offer a compelling global customer experience at scale, you need advanced data
management practices. Data, when managed and mined properly, helps you optimize
international online stores, increase sales and margins, and personalize marketing initiatives.

Manage reports across stores to gain a holistic view of your performance. Tools like Glew

Getting to know your international customers

and Grow combine data across your stores in one place, so you can monitor and identify
trends and issues. You can also monitor information about products, orders, and shipping
to measure metrics like customer lifetime value, acquisition costs, and net profit.

Simplify your data across multiple stores with these changes to your Google Analytics:

• To view the conversion-funnel report by country, add a new view for every
relevant country and/or language.

By creating views, you can segment the conversion-funnel report according

to country without having to use the Advanced Segments feature.

VIEW

All Web Site Data

Search

All Web Site Data

Test

Create new view Using 2 out of 25

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How To Scale Your Global Business

• Segment your funnel and analyze behaviors with Enhanced Ecommerce.

Getting to know your international customers

Uncover what’s stopping your international visitors from completing their purchases by
analyzing shopping behavior, segmented by language or location. Use the data to inform
future user-experience and design decisions.

Care for every customer

Expanding internationally means offering support to customers across different time zones,
languages, and channels. Multiple support options are the foundation of good customer
service for a global brand. Apart from having an FAQ page, a shipping policy page (including
how customers can request returns, cancellations, and changes), and social media, consider
offering live chat.

If you’re operating stores in foreign languages, you’ll need native-language functionality.

Seventy-two percent of customers are more likely to buy from your brand if you can respond
to their questions in their own language.

But using a multilingual chat service with non-native speakers relying on translation tools
can slow the process and diminish customer satisfaction. Use a tool like Gorgias or Zendesk
to automate and scale customer support for multiple languages.

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How To Scale Your Global Business

Level up your multi-language techniques

The form fields in your localized sites should match the standard format for each country.
It’s a common mistake to provide fields that are too short for international addresses
or, worse, fail to accept international addresses altogether. In some countries it’s more
appropriate to ask for a family name or surname instead of a last name. Italy and Mexico
place the house number after the street name. Most streets in Japan don’t have names,
so you need to include the block number.

And keep in mind the shoppers in your target market who read right to left, like many
Arabic-speaking consumers. The universally observed F-pattern of scanning a website
is mirrored for these shoppers.

Localization also means translating dimensions and apparel sizing charts. For example, if
you sell women’s shoes, size 8 in the United Kingdom is size 42 in Europe and 26.5 in Japan.

Consider also using local accents in your ads and replacing your hero and product images
with models from your target country. Include local climate, religion, and cultural trends in

Getting to know your international customers

your translation activities too.

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How To Scale Your Global Business

Making your supply

chain more sustainable
Increasingly, customers are choosing to buy from brands that can demonstrate they’re
doing good, whether ethically, socially, or environmentally. In 2021 more than half of the
world’s online shoppers purchased from a company because of their clear commitment
to sustainability. More than three-quarters of consumers are concerned about the
environmental impact of the products they buy, and 42% want to know a brand is actively
reducing its carbon footprint.

Sustainability isn’t just about attracting customers—it could also be required by regulations
in different markets. The California Transparency in Supply Chains Act is just one example
of legislation that’s predicted to become more common worldwide as consumers call for
greater transparency.

Making your supply chain more sustainable

Reduce your carbon footprint
It’s estimated that by 2030, parcel deliveries will increase by 78%, resulting in 32% more
emissions. Yet, only about 23% of brands are currently offsetting carbon emissions.

78%
More parcel
deliveries
32%
More carbon
emissions
by 2030

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How To Scale Your Global Business

Reducing your carbon footprint can range from simple solutions, like offering offsetting
to customers at checkout, to the more complex. Consider decentralizing your inventory
centers or working with a third-party logistics (3PL) provider to not only get goods to
consumers faster, but also save 50% of transport-related greenhouse gas emissions and
reduce the overall footprint per package by an average of 10%, according to MIT.

Make product packaging recyclable,

compostable, or reusable
Gone are the days of single-use plastic mailers. Research shows that packaging is one
of the largest sources of ecommerce emissions, at up to six times higher than products
produced by consumers in brick-and-mortar stores.

Recyclable, compostable, or reusable packaging is the way forward, with 40% of brands
indicating they plan on investing in sustainable packaging in the next year.

Making your supply chain more sustainable

Many 3PLs now offer sustainable packaging options. But if you’re packing and fulfilling
orders in house, consider ordering packaging from a company like The Better Packaging
Co. or EcoEnclose. Both companies design poly bags made from 100% recycled ocean-
bound plastic and fully biodegradable mailing satchels. Reusable packaging (like the
vinyl envelopes offered by startup LimeLoop) is also becoming more popular.

40% of brands plan to invest in sustainable

packaging in the next year

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How To Scale Your Global Business

Hold your business accountable

to sustainability goals
Creating internal targets for your business (including how to audit and report on them
both internally and externally) is key. These may include creating codes of conduct
and strict procurement policies, which should also apply to any suppliers or 3PLs
you work with.

Holding your business accountable to the goals you set and being transparent about
your progress also attracts and retains customers. According to a commissioned
study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Shopify in 2021, 41% of
shoppers said a significant influence on their purchasing decisions in the last year
was when a brand made it “easy to understand the actions they are taking to achieve
their environmental and/or social impact goals.” Fifty-two percent of shoppers are
also more likely to purchase from a company with shared values.

Making your supply chain more sustainable

Manage international reverse logistics
You’re not alone if you feel unprepared to handle returns on a global scale. Customers
return their online purchases three times more than their in-store purchases, and 68%
of consumers expect free returns.

And consumers still demand sustainability. Three out of four consumers prefer to buy
from brands that offer sustainable return options, and 71% of customers are willing to
pay more to return items sustainably. Start with simple changes to your return policy
to cut down on waste, like omitting return labels from your parcels and making it easy
for your customers to print their own labels when needed.

Implementing reverse logistics can slash labor and packaging costs while improving
customer satisfaction. Efficient reverse-logistics processes include routing cross-
border returns to the appropriate warehouse or 3PL, refunding in multiple currencies,
and adjusting inventory. Setting up a reverse supply chain can help you establish new
product lines and secondary markets worth tens of millions in annual sales.

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How To Scale Your Global Business

Using automation
to prevent fraud,
boost efficiency, and
accelerate growth
The complexity associated with global scaling compounds with each market you enter.

Using automation to prevent fraud, boost efficiency, and accelerate growth

To scale faster with fewer resources, enterprises are turning to tools like Shopify Flow
to automate their growth.

Ecommerce automation
Set-it-and-forget-it workflows based on relevant triggers, conditions, and actions
simplify processes, reduce the risk of human error, and free you to operate globally
with fewer internal resources—which means easier international entry and growth.

Here’s what these tools help you do:

• Schedule changes to your online store for major events

• Reverse those changes automatically
• List new products on multiple channels
• Tag and segment customers for retention
• Streamline tracking and reporting
• Identify and cancel high-risk orders
• Send inventory alerts for reordering and marketing
• Standardize merchandising for discoverability
• Integrate third-party tools and apps

Ecommerce automation is also preventing one of the biggest risks in international trade:
fraud. Unfortunately, the increase in online sales brought to us by the 2020 pandemic
also increased the instances of fraud, which continues to be an issue in 2022.

Detecting fraud is the first step. The real value of ecommerce automation is stopping
fraud from happening right after it’s detected, which is possible through the use of
Shopify Flow templates.

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How To Scale Your Global Business

Supply chain automation

Inventory management automation and supply chain automation are keys to scaling
internationally. So it’s not surprising that worldwide spending on process automation
was expected to top US$83 billion by the end of 2021.

Using automation to prevent fraud, boost efficiency, and accelerate growth

Percentage change in artificial intelligence investment in
organizations worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic
2020, by industry

Increased No change Decreased

44% 44% 11%

Healthcare systems and services (including pharma and medical products)

42% 36% 22%

Automotive and assembly

28% 50% 22%

Financial services

26% 50% 23%

Consumer packaged goods and retail

25% 48% 27%

Professional services

24% 52% 23%

High tech and telecommunications

Source: McKinsey, 2020

Marketing automation
Cross-channel campaign management gets trickier as you expand into new regions and
countries. Centralizing and automating campaigns makes your marketing scale with you.

Marketing automation infused with artificial intelligence predicts and prevents customer
churn, personalizes cross-channel customer engagement, and drives billions of dollars in
additional revenue.

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How To Scale Your Global Business

How Shopify
can help

Shopify Markets, Shopify Shipping, and Shopify Payments

With Shopify Markets, you can tap into international markets from a single site by
optimizing for international customers. Using a centralized dashboard, you’re able
to customize languages and domains, as well as:

• Currencies: Shopify Payments lets you sell in over 100 currencies.

• Payment methods: Customers can pay with their favorite payment
methods, including iDEAL for customers in the Netherlands and
Bancontact for those in Belgium.

How Shopify can help

• International pricing: Customize your product prices based on
the market a customer is buying from.
• Shipping zones: Create different profiles and shipping zones using
Shopify Shipping. Set your fees according to where customers are
shipping products to and from.

Learn more about Shopify Markets

Shopify Flow

For marketing and ecommerce automation, there’s Shopify Flow.

This built-in tool allows merchants to scale and grow their businesses by
automating tasks and processes, including the launch of specific sales. You can
coordinate marketing emails with sales launches, automatically hide out-of-stock
items during busy sales events (like Black Friday or Click Frenzy), and automate
risk management workflows—like flagging high-risk orders for review.

Learn more about Shopify Flow templates

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How To Scale Your Global Business

Shop Pay

If you’re looking to improve your business' sustainability, offer Shop Pay on your online
store. This app lets you offer customers carbon-neutral deliveries and a one-tap checkout
experience. Every time a customer places an order using the app, Shopify funds carbon
removal to counteract the impact on the planet—at no extra cost to you.

Planet app

Gaining loyal customers today means meeting demand for products and sustainability.
Shopify’s Planet app helps you check both boxes.

Every time an order is processed and shipped, a small contribution (between 3.5 and 15
cents) is made to purchase carbon removal credits from companies part of the Shopify
Sustainability Fund.

Show potential and existing customers you are actively supporting carbon-removal
technologies by placing a “Planet badge” on your website. The Planet app dashboard
also lets you share and illustrate the scope of your contribution to the fight against
climate change.

How Shopify can help

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How To Scale Your Global Business

Merchant spotlight:

Paperlike
Paperlike’s core product offering is small and simple: a screen protector for iPads that
makes writing and drawing easier.

But that doesn’t mean scaling the business for the global market was going to be an easy
feat, particularly with a team that’s just as lean as its product offerings. Paperlike has just
six team members (including founder Jan Sapper) who work only 30 hours a week. Yet,
it serves 500,000 customers in over 176 countries with just one store. The secret to its
international success? Relying on automation to scale.

Paperlike uses Shopify Plus tools (like Shopify Flow, Scripts, and Launchpad) and

Merchant spotlight: Paperlike

apps to automate the majority of its operational and marketing tasks and eliminate as
much human labor as possible. The brand now runs a truly international business and
experiences 180% growth year over year. Most importantly, it hasn’t had to sacrifice its
flexible work culture and small team in order to do so.

Source: Paperlike, 2022

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How To Scale Your Global Business

Scaling confidently with Shopify Plus

Time, technology, and trade change quickly. Like you, Shopify is at the forefront
of global expansion.

Shopify Plus makes it easy to sell internationally in 175 countries and 21 languages
through a single online store. Even if it’s your first time selling cross-border, integrations
with best-in-class 3PLs mean you and your customers can profit from global expansion.

This toolkit gives you the hands-on strategies you need

to navigate each phase of international expansion:

How To Navigate Global Commerce Trends in 2022

How To Map Your Global Expansion

How To Launch Your Global Business

How To Expand Internationally

How To Scale Your Global Business

It’s time to move your global brand forward. And Shopify Plus
is ready to partner with you every step of the way.

Let's talk

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