Doing Business Internationally
December 28, 2008
The more you expand your business, the more customers you can reach – that is true. However, when you open your market up to potential new customers, you can also begin a whole new set of programs as well. If you’re looking to start an international portion of your business, here are some things that you will want to keep in mind.
There are two main questions that you will need to ask about this new marketplace:
- Is the customer going to pay me?
- Is the customer going to want to pay me?
The truth of the matter is that the more customers you have the more risk you are taking on. Because you’re increasing the possibility of things going wrong, you need to be a little concerned about these questions – because if you’re not going to get paid, it’s not a wise move.
The first thing that you will want to do is consider how you will want to be paid for your services. You might want to accept credit cards as these accounts can be verified quite easily and without much added cost to you. Things like checks can take longer to verify and can even cause legal troubles in some cases, so those kinds of payments might be easier to limit to countries with which you are most familiar.
However, there are ways to put safeguards in place so that you can be sure that you’re getting paid for services or products that you are selling on the international market. For one, you will want to have some sort of merchant account of third party processor in place to watch the credit card payments that you are receiving. These services will be able to detect fraudulent accounts and stop the transaction from continuing until the situation is remedied. These services can also keep your information secure by acting as an intermediary in financial transactions.
You will also want to create standard shipping policies for international orders that include the full shipping price, insurance as well as tracking. You will also want to make sure that you are never shipping orders that you haven’t verified the payment for. What sometimes happens is that you will ship an order, but then never receive payment, though the product is gone.
Another concern that you might want to consider is that prevalent fraud that is coming from international sources. Your business email accounts might become targets for international schemes when you start to open up to the international market. You should always be on the lookout for any offers for purchases that aren’t coming directly from your secure shopping cart or standard methods of purchase. And if anything doesn’t quite seem right, don’t follow through on any actions that are asked of you.
All of this is not to discourage international business, but rather to realize that you need to be careful when your customers aren’t right in front of you – just as with any online customer. But when you have international customers, they can be harder to track down for legal actions, if at all. Being too careful is always the best policy.
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