4 International Selling Tips for BigCommerce Users with PIM

What is cross-border commerce?

To put it simply, cross-border eCommerce involves trading products and services across international trade borders.

Nevertheless, scaling your business internationally has a number of challenges. To name a few, these include shipping complications, increased business overheads, language and cultural differences, legal regulations, and currency.

That being said, there are obvious benefits. A well executed cross-border strategy will create a spike in customer demand and orders. The global-cross border eCommerce market is expected to reach $2,248.57-billion by 2026, so it’s something to aim for.

To reap the benefits, a best-of-breed eCommerce tech stack will enable you to grow your business and scale overseas.

The good news is, because BigCommerce is a headless solution, you’re able to integrate further software solutions to bolster your international goals. This is where PIM enters the conversation.

1. Easily expand your product range in new territories with efficient product launches

International expansion is enabled by Pimberly’s ability to rapidly expand your product range. This is because Pimberly ingests an unlimited number of supplier feeds. So, you easily onboard product data from a variety of upstream applications, supplier feeds, or spreadsheets. These configurable inputs mean data validation for new products is quick and easy.

Once you’ve enriched your product information from the Pimberly platform, it then gets pushed to your BigCommerce multi storefronts (we’ll get to these later) near-instantly via the Pimberly-BigCommerce Connector.

Ultimately, Pimberly provides you with the necessary tools to be agile when scaling overseas. Quickly adapt to any snap market changes in different territories with consistent product data.

PIM supports scalability for future growth

Selling in global markets comes with increased volumes of product data. With it, so do your data management requirements.

Even though BigCommerce comes with powerful functionality for managing transactions (managed through an intuitive interface), finessing product information across hundreds of thousands of SKUs is tedious and time consuming. This will be detrimentatal to your expansion efforts.

Whether you’re looking to expand into new countries or introduce more product lines across your BigCommerce storefronts, PIM will handle the increased volume of product data, helping you maintain efficient management of your growing product catalog.

Example: global sporting good manufacturing

Let’s say you’re a global sporting goods manufacturer based in the USA and you’re planning to expand into Europe and Asia. However, across your target territories, some of your products are going to be more popular than others. Coupled with this, there are several seasonal variations: winter sports are more popular in Europe, but less so in parts of Asia.

To manage this, PIM will set specific product lines for different territories, as well as allowing you to respond to the market demand in each region. This ensures customers see relevant products for their region and season. And, the Pimberly-BigCommerce connector will ensure your products are pushed to the relevant BigCommerce storefront.

2. Localize product data and increase sales

In order to drive sales in new territories, you need to speak to potential customers in a language they understand.

This doesn’t just mean displaying product data in their native language. Instead, you need to curate a shopping experience to match the cultural nuances of the many diverse markets. You need to create compelling customer experiences specific to buyers from different countries.

In a recent survey, 76% prefer to purchase products with information displayed in their own language. The good news is Pimberly comes with functionality for localizing product data, helping to remove language barriers and cultural differences.

Doesn’t BigCommerce already come with localization capabilities?

Yes, BigCommerce allows merchants to easily create multilingual storefronts, displaying checkout processes and customer support in the language of their target market.

However, when it comes to nuts and bolts of product information (product descriptions, titles, etc), managing them from a single source of truth ensures your international teams have accurate product data.

In addition, when you’re managing large amounts of product data, PIM enables you to efficiently make bulk product updates allowing you to accelerate your international expansion.

In short, you should absolutely leverage BigCommerce’s support for localized checkout processes and customer support. However, when it comes to product information, managing it in a fit-for-purpose PIM is much more efficient.

International expansion for BigCommerce merchants is easier with Pimberly Locales

Essentially, Pimberly Locales enable BigCommerce merchants to define how data is exported to individual sales regions. All users have to do is set an attribute as ‘localizable’, which then allows you to store product information – translations and currencies – against the corresponding product.

Whether your localized data comes from an in-house team – or a third-party feed – localized data is stored in a single product record.

It isn’t just translations. Pimberly will also localize product imagery. For instance, images that resonate with one culture might not have the same impact in another. Or, different countries may have specific regulations, labeling requirements, or censorship rulings.

By localizing product imagery, you use visuals aligned with local culture and customers. This way, you’ll be making your products more appealing and relatable to customers in specific regions.

Examples of localized product data Pimberly will store include:

• Translations
• Pricing
• Currencies
• Digital assets
• Alt. text

Within a product, you’re able to change and differentiate values, depending on which territory they are being sold in. When you’re happy each value is correct, Pimberly’s workflows will push your products to your correct BigCommerce storefront across multiple borders

3. Manage product data effectively across BigCommerce Multi-Storefront

BigCommerc’s Multi-Storefront (MSF) allows BigCommerce merchants to manage unique storefronts from a single dashboard. Not only does this help multi-brand and multi-segment brands, but also-multi region. This way, brands and businesses are able to sell more with cross-border commerce.

From BigCommerce, you’re able to localize a number of features on a storefront by storefront basis. For instance, for storefronts in France, you can change the transactional emails to be in French. If your storefront is in the UK, your abandoned cart emails will be in British English, and so on.

In addition, customize each storefront with BigCommerce’s powerful builder so it aligns with any cultural nuances of each territory. So, if you’re an American clothing brand with Japanese storefront, include design to appeal to Japanese aesthetics. This allows you to be much more savvy when targeting new territories.

How does PIM power BigCommerce storefronts with localized product data?

In short, let Pimberly take care of the nitty gritty and handle the fun parts of international commerce with BigCommerce.

When managing multiple storefronts, the amount of product data you handle will inevitably increase, Pimberly makes it easier to handle large amounts of localized product in bulk with powerful workflows and data governance tools.

Simply, you manage and maintain a product’s central, golden record from within the PIM. Then, you scope different variations, corresponding to the relevant BigCommerce storefront.

For instance, if you have a French storefront, Pimberly will hold the relevant product data for that storefront. This will include digital assets, translated product descriptions, and other instances of localized product data.

4. Access new marketplaces with unlimited channel management

As mentioned earlier, Pimberly ingests product data from an unlimited number of feeds. Then, it will standardize it to suit the data requirements of the channel you’re sending it to, including your BigCommerce storefronts.

However, if you’re looking to step-up your expansion efforts outside of BigCommerce, Pimberly will enable this, too.

For instance, you might want to sell across different marketplaces across the world. For instance, JD.com, is a fast growing and established eCommerce giant. It’s also home to huge 9% of the worldwide eCommerce space.

The Chinese platform allows reliable third-party merchants to sell products to customers via their website or mobile channels. However, it comes with it’s own product data requirements, just like Amazon, eBay, and your very own BigCommerce store.

Nevertheless, PIM will ensure the right data gets pushed to the correct channel in the right format. This means, you can easily expand through international marketplaces without concerns about product data mix-ups or being overloaded by product data. Instead, Pimberly will handle separate versions of product data for your BigCommerce storefronts and international marketplaces.

With PIM, you get the best of both worlds. PIM makes selling internationally on BigCommerce straightforward enough to scale elsewhere.

Key Points

• Easily expand your product range and accelerate your go-to market without being overloaded by huge amounts of product data that come with international expansion.
• Quickly update your product catalog to respond to regional and seasons variations via the Pimberly-BigCommerce Connector.
• Tailor bespoke shopping experiences by localizing product data from within PIM to remove language and cultural barriers.
• Drive multiple BigCommerce Multi-Storefronts from a single Pimberly instance and scope localized product data to each storefront accordingly.
• International expansion with PIM allows you to access international markets and overseas opportunities without mixing up product data on your BigCommerce store. Perhaps one of the best benefits of leveraging our international selling tips for BigCommerce!