I used to be a fairly typical electronic-commerce activist. I was involved in a number of electronic-commerce R&D projects, but rarely bought anything online. Like most of my colleagues, I lived in the United States and had never realized how US-centric my attitudes and perspectives were.
Seven months ago, I moved to Israel. Since then, I've bought plenty of stuff online, from a number of different stores, and have realized that the foundations of most commercial Web sites are the antithesis of "worldwide." More importantly, moving has given me a new perspective on electronic commerce, supplying me with new motivations for buying products online and a new point of reference for analyzing how well most online stores serve the global market. My conclusion: not very.
Let's start with some basics. Many Web developers and business people tend to assume that, while the United States is way ahead of the pack in technological sophistication and innovation, the rest of the world is living in an era of TRS-80s and 2400-baud modems. However, many other countries - such as Israel and many Western European nations - have higher per capita usage for technologies like the Web, cellular phones, ISDN lines, and the like. Israel happens to be a haven for Internet software and technology start-up companies. So there's no shortage of people outside the US with the access and inclination to conduct transactions online, but they are grossly underserved or excluded from existing ecommerce models.
When we think of the Web, we think English. We've all seen the occasional site with other languages or with fonts that we don't have, but all the significant material on the Web is in English, right? Mostly, but not entirely. Many countries have a growing amount of Web material in their respective languages, especially regional online stores. Even if these stores aren't real competition for bigger US-based stores, they have cornered the commercial markets conducted in those languages.
Any online store that has even a minimal amount of material, such as an alternative homepage, in a non-English language will find that whole new markets open to it. Reciprocally, the new markets will respond to newly available stores that are friendly to their native tongues. CDNow, for example, has begun to support European languages using "standard" characters, but even this is no simple task.
One simpler area of pervasive Americanism is the design of online forms. As anyone who's tried to use these forms outside the US knows, there's more to internationalization than replacing the term "ZIP code" with "postal code" as well as "state" with "state or province." How many digits in a phone number or postal code? Are users required to enter a state or province or a postal code? Are punctuation characters allowed in street numbers? Web sites that are built around American norms can be unusable to non-US customers. I know some people who have tried to outwit the awkward forms by entering their country of residence in the text field designated for "state," or have tried entering place holders like ".." or "–" just to avoid an error message like: "You must fill in every field before we can process your order."
Many US-based online stores lack overseas shipping, too. It isn't difficult to implement more inclusive shipping options, and some stores like Amazon.com serve overseas customers well. Others, however, are trapped in their US-postal mentality and have a hard time breaking out. When I asked one online store owner why he didn't offer overseas shipping, he replied that overnight shipping was prohibitively expensive overseas. The idea that overseas customers might settle for air mail, and that buying his products with a one-week delay might still be valuable, had never crossed his mind.
American-centered thinking has come to dominate the prevailing philosophies about electronic commerce. For instance, many online stores assume that customers only shop on the Net for esoteric or hard-to-find items, and will stick with physical stores for easy-to-find, popular items. Granted, it's easier to find some hot-sellers at physical stores that sell these items at rock-bottom prices as loss leaders to get you into the store. As an owner and manager of an online CD store once told me, "People can always buy the top 100 at a local drugstore more easily than going online. They come to us for the hard-to-find items."
But to a customer outside the US, things aren't that simple. Many products that are staples in the States are hard to find abroad. One US-based online grocery store sells children's Motrin-brand painkiller at a discount price to motivate people to buy it online instead of coming into the store. The assumption is that this is such a staple item that most customers won't go online to buy it unless motivated by the discount. Abroad, however, such products can be far from a staple item, and may be economical overseas even with shipping costs tacked on.
Furthermore, even if the popular items are available in local stores, they probably cost more because of import taxes and standard markups on American products. Online, those added costs disappear. A few months ago, I wanted to buy the latest John Grisham book. A local bookstore had it right away, but for the local equivalent of US$32. Online I found it for $15. Of course, I had to pay shipping, but I still saved money, especially since I bought more than one book at once to amortize the shipping costs.
So here's a word of advice to owners of online stores: Invest the time and energy to make your World Wide Web store truly worldwide. Design your forms to be friendly for non-English speakers and non-US residents. Offer international shipping (remember, it doesn't have to be overnight). Consider adding multiple languages (at least the European languages based on the same alphabet as English).
But most important, rethink your assumptions about what products are worth offering. If you do this, and make it known that you're doing it, it will pay off on a global scale.
Related articles:
Michael Schrage on the wordless Web
John McChesney's HotSeat on Europe's Net lag
Simson Garfinkel on electronic border-control
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
