Selling abroad online: a complete guide in 5 simple steps

Selling abroad is a great opportunity to reach new customers and grow your business's revenue.

Thanks to the ability to sell online worldwide, commerce no longer has geographic borders: according to market research, global e-commerce store sales will reach a record value of 5.4 trillion dollars in 2022 and will keep climbing in the coming years, and 80% of merchants say selling abroad has increased their profits.

If you too want to sell abroad, in this guide you'll find all the information you're looking for to start selling worldwide.

We'll give you practical tips and strategies on how to expand your e-commerce beyond Italy's borders effectively, and we'll explore the tax requirements and everything you need to know about international shipping.

Enjoy the read!

1. How to sell abroad with an online store

2. How to ship abroad

3. Marketplaces, a unique opportunity

4. Tax obligations and requirements for selling abroad

5. Practical marketing tips for selling abroad

1. How to sell abroad with an online store

If you run an online store, you have everything you need to start selling abroad and increase your e-commerce sales. You may already have sold a product outside national borders, but if you really want to grow your brand's visibility you'll need an international strategy to reach your global goals.

The first thing to consider for selling abroad online is choosing which markets to focus on. Study each country's potential based on market size, ease of doing business, and target audience, defining an international buyer persona: if you sell ski accessories, you'll probably get more sales in Austria or Germany than in markets like Greece or Portugal.

Remember that to succeed in other countries you need to offer your customers a localized experience, translating your online store to win their trust and increase your conversion rate.

In a specialized study, 65% of respondents said they prefer sites translated into their language for online shopping, while 40% say they won't buy from websites that aren't translated.

But as you can imagine, translating your online store into several languages is a long and costly task. To automate it, there are many translation apps for each of the e-commerce platforms you can choose from:

In addition to navigation and product pages, don't forget to localize the e-commerce checkout experience: this stage is truly crucial and can make the difference between a completed sale and an abandoned cart before finishing the purchase.

To encourage customers to click the fateful "Buy now" button, consider offering local payment methods: according to research, 7% of customers abandoned their cart because they couldn't find their preferred payment method.

Localizing the browsing experience is the first step to selling abroad online successfully: you'll need to do the same for your marketing campaigns too, taking into account the customs and habits of the market you want to expand into, and attract qualified traffic by localizing your online store's SEO strategy.

2. How to ship abroad

Now that your store is localized and ready to sell abroad, you're probably wondering "how will I ship my products outside Italy?".

International shipping is one of the biggest obstacles to international selling encountered by Italian companies. According to Casaleggio Associati, in 2021 49% of e-commerce stores sell abroad, versus 51% that sell only in Italy.

The good news is that shipping abroad isn't all that complicated: if you ship within the European Union everything is easier, while if your customers are beyond European borders you'll have to fill out a series of customs forms and get an EORI code, as well as an alphanumeric code called an HS code required for all cross-border shipments.

Also, check that the goods aren't prohibited in the destination country and consult IATA's (International Air Transport Association) Dangerous Goods Regulations (DGR), a list of goods barred from air transport.

But how much does it cost to ship abroad? The costs to ship your products can be considerable depending on the goods' destination country and the type of shipment.

The shipping cost shouldn't account for more than 8-12% of the sale price, but with transport costs constantly rising, shipping expenses could have a bigger impact.

To help you navigate the carriers' offerings, we've created a complete guide to international shipping costs that will help you find the solution best suited to your needs by comparing the rates of the main carriers for shipping abroad.

Shipping abroad with Sendcloud

If none of them convince you, try Sendcloud, with which you can access pre-negotiated international shipping rates with carriers, fully scalable and tailored to your business.

With Sendcloud you can even start for free; just create your account and start shipping in less than 10 minutes, saving time and money.

What's more, Sendcloud is a shipping software that lets you manage the entire shipping process from a single interface, send branded tracking emails, and analyze your shipments.

3. How to sell abroad on marketplaces

Another option for selling abroad online is marketplaces. Marketplaces are on a big rise in Italy. These sales channels let you show your products to millions of potential customers around the world.

If you choose to sell on marketplaces, you won't have to worry about attracting traffic and winning people's trust, because they'll already feel protected buying on a well-known, trusted marketplace.

The downside of selling on marketplaces, besides the service fees, is the high competition from the companies selling on these platforms.

To stand out, try not to compete on price alone but above all on the after-sales support you offer customers; this strategy will help you get positive reviews and appear higher in search results.

To sell abroad on marketplaces, you'll first have to choose whether to focus on a horizontal marketplace (which sells any type of product, like Amazon or eBay) or a vertical marketplace (specialized in a specific product category, like Zalando for shoes and clothing or ManoMano for DIY).

Selling abroad online on marketplaces greatly simplifies managing international shipments, often because the marketplace provides you with a range of tools and solutions to help you ship.

This is the case with Amazon FBA, or Fulfillment by Amazon, which lets you delegate all the product storage and shipping operations to the e-commerce giant.

On the other hand, outsourcing shipping greatly limits the ability to personalize the delivery and unboxing experience of your products, a real marketing tool that can help you stand out from the competition.

4. Tax obligations and requirements for selling abroad

To sell abroad online you'll have to comply with a series of additional tax obligations and requirements.

If you sell within the European Union, you'll have to register for the EU OSS scheme to declare and pay VAT on distance sales of goods within the European Union.

This system, which came into force on 1 July last year, lets you significantly reduce the bureaucracy for paying VAT on intra-EU sales, and provides that the VAT applied on sales is always that of the goods' destination country, except for sales worth less than 10,000 euros, for which you can continue to apply the VAT rate of the country of origin.

Companies are also required to submit a quarterly VAT return, which doesn't replace the one to be submitted at national level. To explore the topic, the European Commission has prepared a complete guide to the new OSS scheme available to download for free.

There are also additional requirements to keep in mind within the European Union.

As for non-EU sales, to sell to other business entities (B2B sales) you'll have to issue an invoice without VAT and attach an export declaration, submit the export declaration to the departure customs office, and obtain clearance from the arrival one.

To sell to non-EU private individuals (B2C sales), instead, you'll have to issue a tax invoice, exempt from VAT. The shipped goods will be subject to the VAT and duties of the destination country, payable by the end customer.

Once customs clearance and delivery of the goods are done, you'll need to record the MRN documents (Movement Reference Number) that certify the goods' exit from EU territory and that VAT and customs obligations have been met. To help you fill them out without errors, we've created a complete guide to the CN22 and CN23 customs forms.

5. Practical marketing tips for selling abroad

Before wrapping up this guide on how to expand your e-commerce's borders, here are a few marketing tips to increase your international sales.

The golden rule is always the same: localize your commercial strategy paying particular attention to the customs and habits of individual countries, including in your choice of channel.

In China, for example, social commerce is huge and in 2021 reached a record value of 363 billion dollars, which is why you can't ignore it if you want to win over the Chinese market.

If you do marketing with Facebook, create specific campaigns for each country and study your buyers' behavioral habits: this way you can understand which products sell the most abroad and suggest them to customers at checkout with a sophisticated upselling and cross-selling strategy that will let you increase your average order value (AOV).

We've reached the end of this guide on how to sell abroad online: we hope it's been useful for defining your commercial strategy and starting to sell around the world.