Cross-Border Trade Lures UK Online Retailers

As the UK e-commerce market is beginning to reach a much more advanced stage of maturity, cross-border trade is becoming a lucrative option for local sector players. Trading across borders offers a raft of opportunities for retailers to achieve a healthy growth, as these markets keep developing and consumers are broadly going online to shop, according to a report I just read from IMRG.

The e-retail experts project that this year cross-border sales on the old continent will account for 10.6% of the region’s combined online sales, hitting EUR36 billion in value terms. In 2012, UK retailers generated £7.4 billion in sales with international consumers, emerging as the most successful players in the cross-border trade market.

Over the past couple of years, the UK e-retail market has been enjoying robust growth rates each year, falling behind the US only on overall sales value, IMRG noted. This year, the analysts expect UK retailers to record £10 billion in sales to international consumers.

Embracing cross-border trade is a good opportunity for domestic online retailers given the advanced stage of the domestic market and its sophistication, IMRG chief operations and policy officer Andrew McClelland commented. Still, overseas trade is a challenging task to handle and retailers should wisely choose the markets they want to expand in, picking only those that perfectly fit their profiles.

One of the main obstacles to expanding internationally is building confidence among consumers, IMRG said. According to a study from Trusted Shops, about 75% of people shopping online consider an internationally-known trustmark important or very important when planning to buy items from a foreign retailer.