Increasing your cross-border sales has never been easier. Today, eBay’s Head of European Partner Development, Sanja Kon, shares how the eBay Global Shipping Programme allows you to reach new international customers with a few straightforward clicks.
Hi Pentagon, I am a Digital Executive with extensive international experience in developing global ecommerce strategy and delivering sustainable revenue growth. At eBay, I lead cross functional teams to build and execute a scalable European Partnerships strategy, with the aim of providing the best in class selling experience to eBay B2C merchants.
Specifically, I help sellers to remove the hassle of selling on eBay by partnering with selected service providers. As well as full-service providers that typically cover all aspects of selling on eBay, there are a number of service providers that specialise in particular parts of selling, such as optimising listings or supporting sellers who list vehicle parts and accessories. All of these service providers support retailers looking to grow their business internationally.
The Global Shipping Program (GBP) is an eBay solution that makes it easier for our merchants to reach global customers, post sold items overseas, and remove the hassle of the international sales process.
We know that when exporting, our retailers can sell more and build a more successful business. So, by selling through eBay GBP, our merchants have access to a global audience of 171M buyers, opening up a world of selling and growth opportunities.
In fact, with the Global Shipping Programme, international postage is just as simple as selling to someone in the UK. All a seller needs to do is post the item to a UK Shipping Centre, and eBay will take care of customs clearance, tracking and all the rest. Sellers do not have to pay anything extra – just the cost of posting the item to the UK Shipping Centre.
The Global Shipping Programme takes the complexity out of international transactions and makes sellers listings available to new markets across the globe.
For the buyers, the advantage is that they get clear up front pricing, including shipping and duty so that there are no nasty surprises when the item arrives.
For the sellers, international transactions become easy to manage as eBay takes care of everything required to send the item to the buyer, including managing customs, international delivery costs and import charges. eBay’s Global Shipping Programme is also ideal for filling in the gaps when there are countries where sellers don’t wish to ship to.
If a seller wants to have their listings displayed beyond search results, giving the chance for more buyers to see their items in new places on eBay, the best option to use is the “promoted listings tool”. Promoted Listings is a self-serve advertising service available on eBay for store subscribers, with Above Standard or eBay Top Rated Seller (eTRS) status.
Sellers select the listings they wish to promote, and decide how much they are willing to pay to support them – a seller will pay only when their item is purchased.
The tool gives the seller a full control: sellers can monitor performance and sales quickly, and easily make changes or optimise their campaign
My best advice is to not only focus on the key elements of listing optimisation and building relevance but to keep evolving your business in a way that reflects the evolutions of commerce and eBay.
As we operate in a dynamic world where ecommerce is constantly changing and evolving, we need to keep up with the same pace. What worked before is not guaranteed to work now. So, if you started trading on eBay when it first came to the UK, what made you successful then will not necessarily make you successful now.
eBay changes are largely driven by changes in the market. If we fail to keep up, buyers will shop elsewhere. And this means if you sell on eBay you need to keep pace too. One example of a recent eBay change is product identifiers – designed to help us to show our customers items that are more relevant when they search on eBay.
Additionally, when it comes to search, buyers don’t want to scroll through hundreds of listings on their phone – they want to find the item they’re looking for quickly, at the right price, then buy and get it delivered fast. Buyer expectations are changing.
I think that Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality will reshape the commerce experience shortly.
Artificial intelligence has the potential to bring an era of deep personalisation to the commerce space.
We are entering what we call the ‘Age of Everywhere’ – the profusion of cloud-connected devices that will bring the internet to you, globalise the market, and make things faster and more on-demand. It becomes extremely important to get to the customer rapidly and easily and, in this context, we have been making strategic investments to accelerate our artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.
Virtual and augmented reality will be the next platform revolution. This is already prevalent in the gaming world, but it has the potential to be far more disruptive.
These innovations will create enormous opportunity for commerce companies prepared to take advantage of them.
Let us develop a tailored solution for your business that will help you reach new international customers and grow your global sales.
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