 Thank you all for staying, it's been an hour we've got a chance to check out the zoo and I'm really glad that people came back to watch the presentation. This is the first time that I'm presenting in English so it's a bit new territory for me so I'm going to try my best. Today's topic is cross-culture taking your shop abroad and some of the challenges that you might face when you have a successful product in one territory and you want to take it to the next. And the thing that got me interested in this particular topic, this particular problem, was this quote by Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine which is a global hosting company and he said you can just walk into Germany and start selling stuff. I was like where does this complexity come from? Because he's bootstrapped I think four or five companies. He recently did a podcast with Remkes. He's got a lot of experience in scaling companies and then doing this worldwide and why is he still struggling with these kinds of challenges? And let's get the obvious out of the way first and start with language. And the best way for me to figure out where these challenges are is to look at the very big players like the companies that have got this down. So when you look at the Kia website for two different countries in this case it's Estonia and Latvia. Lithuania. That's it. So the style of the website and the images that they're using is almost identical but the text they're using is a different language and we know that language is infinitely difficult. For example when you start with an English text in your home country and you start translating it you figure out that most translations don't have the same text link. So this is a very obvious example of pretty common mistake that's not just made by small companies or startups or companies making their first moves into new territories but also by like the biggest companies in the world they still struggle with this. A different thing and it's kind of related to the localization part is and it's particularly to web shops is pricing. When you start with your base currency and you go abroad you might figure out that there's a different currency symbol but there's also a different way of describing decimals or thousands parts but there's also a country where the currency symbol isn't just one character but it's multiple characters or in the entire world. So you have to figure out how this changes in the territory that you're going to. Also with names when you're shipping to people or want to get to know them or want to send your newsletter you've got this great variety in names that you wouldn't expect to be possible. I think the second one is a Swedish person who's just got a semicolon in his name for some reason. All of these are valid a single letter as your first name. Why not? When we're shipping things internationally you might think of a single place as a place with a single name and in the Netherlands to start we have Den Haag with the Dutch name Strave Haag like a second name for the for the same city and internationally it changed so much so you can't just expect one translation to work in every situation. You have to deal with addresses when shipping stuff abroad. This is a valid UK address. It's four characters and four numbers but this message this arrives somewhere and people can enter this into your website and expect stuff to show up at the door. So there's many more examples of this. I'm sharing this link if you want to do this. Sure. At the end there's also a link once more with examples of translation errors, common or uncommon names, unicode translations, all kinds of stuff and exceptions that you need to take care when moving into a new territory. But let's take language out of the equation. Language is a difficult part but it's not the only part that makes it difficult. For example the media assets that you're using might change based on how they're interpreted in a different location. So these are the corporate sites for Coca-Cola France and Coca-Cola Canada. They're both French no problem there but on the left we're seeing an urban cityscape with obviously French people sitting in front of the Arc de Triomphe or something similar and on the right we see a much different scene of a valley like they want to communicate a different experience to the people visiting the site. The same for when you look at the Nespresso sites for Nespresso Instagram for Brazil and Netherlands. The audience that you might be targeting into different geographies might be different. In the Netherlands it's a lot about the finished product and the experience that people are having while consuming it and they also have like a partnership with local festival. All of these aren't relevant to the Brazil market and they're in the Brazil market they're much more focused on how are things being produced like the feeling of maybe the type of employer that they are and also let's take language back into the equation. There's a lot of images on the internet that contain text so you can just use a single media library and put it on a multi-site and expect five six different different language sites to all use the same images on different language sites and also consider how color is interpreted in different cultures. For example I think it's down here 53 it's love like in the western culture red is a common color used for love or communicating love while in different cultures it might be green or yellow or blue. And also in different markets you might have competitors that are already using your color scheme and when you enter this new market you might be confused with this new competitor so think about the way you're using color in this new market. So we take the language out of the equation but the problems that I'm showing like this is the other side of the world right. So instead of a six-hour flight let's take a 30-minute train ride and go to Belgium because we have our southern neighbors who also speak Dutch so we can compare the Kublew Dutch website and the Kublew Flemish website and they're both Dutch they're both selling exactly the same product to mostly the same culture people but if we check out this Dutch product detail page for a refrigerator you might see some things that are typically Dutch and when we switch to the Belgian side there's a lot of subtle differences you might not have noticed let's see it again so let's zoom in on a couple of them and think about the implications of what they're doing here. So first in the Dutch market there's a thing called consummate want and in the Netherlands this is like a recognized brand people see this and trust like they have done the reviews they trust this and they're like a sign of approval sign of approval in Belgium they're not using on exactly the same product this type of of mark maybe in Belgium there's a different product that's got a better review by a local reviewer there also in the Netherlands they're delivering to the doorstep but they're charging for delivery inside and connecting the device in Belgium probably because they're still gaining territory there this service is free so there's a difference in how they're offering the same product in the Netherlands there's 14 stores and in Belgium there's seven so it might be that in Belgium people have to drive further to see the actual product also in the Netherlands is best the webwinkel and in Belgium it's Klantvriendelijkste so it's it's small wordings like this and we'll see that on the next slide as well that really make a difference in how it's interpreted and feels like something that your neighbor might say instead of someone from a different country so this one is also very interesting and there's a couple of things going on here first of all here again they're mentioning we're putting it on the doorstep while on the right they're saying we're putting it on the place that you're going to use it and they're also saying we're going to take away the old device but only if you put it at your doorstep or if in Belgium we're going to take it away from where you were using it or where we're replacing it in Belgium they're using the word geleverd and in the Netherlands it's bezorgd it's very subtle differences but these are the kind of things that they tested and they they've noticed that they they connect better with their target audience now also in Belgium there's suddenly a different way to pay this is something that doesn't exist in the Netherlands eco checks and obviously people in in Belgium it's a subsidy for government employees I think they want to use this type of payment because otherwise they're going to the competitor if you look into the footer of these websites you're also seeing subtle and less subtle differences different payment methods are being highlighted of course you might be able to pay with ideal on the on the Belgium website website but they don't want you to because it's a distraction while while going through it checker in Belgium they're using PayPal this is a bit of a culture thing between the Netherlands and the rest of the EU where in the Netherlands we're used to paying upfront when the rest of the EU they're used to paying but getting the guarantee that the vendor only gets the money when they receive the product so with a Mastercard or a credit card or PayPal you can always go to PayPal and say I didn't receive it and they're going to refund you right away no discussion possible with ideal once you the money has left your account it's gone it's it's from the vendor here again we see local trademarks so in the Netherlands it's Taishwinkel in Belgium it's a safe shops Dutch delivery partner Belgium delivery partner and a Dutch publisher and a Belgium publisher that like tells us how great they are so what we've seen so far are companies that are doing this well but what happens if you're not doing it well if you are doing it for the wrong reasons you're going to get something like this the title of the left page is Brut Bio Organic it's been translated probably by AI with Brut Bio Bio this doesn't mean anything and if I'm a German person trying to order at this website this is an immediate reply for me at the same time there's some input field that doesn't actually do anything on the German website there's the Dutch text on the bottom of the page there's a lot of things that take me out of the experience of this is something that I want to buy from and makes me doubt my decision to buy because I'm seeing things that I I don't understand why why isn't this just part of the page it can get even worse if you expand too fast into territories that you don't understand you might be wasting a lot of money and have to backtrack fear play as exited a couple of months ago from I think UK Spain Italy a lot of territories that they were expanding into and it's all thrown away cash so let's think about how we're going to decide if going into a different territory is the right decision because there are alternatives you don't have to go abroad to expand your audience or expand your business so product development like selling to the same audience but with a different product is a viable option in the Netherlands there's or in Rotterdam there's this designer who started with the bag on the third spot and she made this out of durable material it was a success and instead of going like I can sell this in Spain she went no I can sell larger bags smaller bags and now suddenly she's making raincoats these are all new products and they're selling to the same audience that someone who buys a bag might buy something else so you don't have to go abroad to grow but if you do want to go abroad do it for the right reasons so reason number one is you have a unique technology in the new market there's no one else doing this kind of thing no one else producing it the same way and you're just gonna like immediately win the market second option is economies of skill you run into like a barrier in your current market and the only way to to like manage getting costs down is to produce more of the same they might want to go around or same this with existing markets but as we've seen with the Dutch and the Flemish market even same this with existing market is very hard to actually get right so how do we decide where and how to expand next and which kind of factors do we need to take care for so if we think about a webshop we have a lot of activities that webshops might do every webshop is unique so the activities that the webshop you're managing or the Dutch or building might be a bit different than this but generally these are areas of interest or activities that you might do so think about shipping delivery fulfillment think about marketing branding and the kinds channels you are using think about maybe in the Netherlands Instagram is big but in a different territory they're using Twitter or X think about store management think about customer service and returns if someone is on the other side of the world and they don't like the product what are going they going to do with it are they going to send it back on a boat or are they just going to throw it in the bin and you're going to refund it payments as we've seen in the kublu example there's a lot of subtle and less subtle differences in how people pay and how they expect to pay and how they expect their money to be handled and also in the regulations that you're committed to and going into a different territory and we're going to match this into different influences different influences on these activities that the webshop is doing so these might be external and we're using a framework called Tesla for this so there might be political influences on the way that you're going to expand into this market or there might be legal issues that you need to take care of when I was walking through the zoo this afternoon someone was saying like we wanted to advertise in Germany but they have very different rules about which kind of products you can advertise because if it's even remotely adjacent to something health related you're not allowed to advertise something like this technological issues or social issues and at the same time we have to take care of our internal influences is the staff ready to handle this new market do we have the skills to take care of the new textuals that we have to inherit can our systems or our organization deal with this so if you put these two together you end up with a matrix like this and at first it seems a bit complicated but we're going to do a very concrete example and then we're going to do a bit wider example we're going to expand it on this so let's for example take the shipping and delivery activity and consider that we're a Dutch company wanting to expand into the Dutch Caribbean territory so our strategy might be that we want to ship in 24 hours because we've seen that in the Dutch market this is working and in the new market in Curaçao other competitors are doing this as well so the strategy is 24-hour shipping how are we going to get our products in Curaçao to the customer within 24 hours we need a warehouse there because we can put it on the boat and expect it to be there we can put it on the plane because it's going to be expensive so we need a new warehouse the systems we suddenly have two warehouses we have two inventories but we have one website keeping stock so we need to know which products are where and which is getting sold out when we need to put another shipment into the other side of the world if we need staff for the new warehouse we need local recruitment so we need a recruitment agency that's going to take care of getting people to work at our warehouse maybe we make an economic analysis and we figure out that there's high youth employment and we might be a very very welcome employer in this new area but at the same time if there's people working for your company and you've worked hard in your own territory in creating a certain company culture how are you going to maintain that company culture when half of it is in different times and on the other side of the world so maybe you want to bring everyone together once a year and finally politics it might be hard to get permits to even get started there and then you might think let's not go there let's just go to Belgium and you can still do 24-hour shipping but you don't need all the rest so this is something to consider but business is a creative problem solving so you might say we're going to Curacao and we're going to do 24-hour delivery but we're going to have third-party fulfillment so we're not going to deal with new employees on the other side of the world we're just going to hire service to do this for us and we need to implement the product inventory system because we're still going to have two inventories next to each other but the impact of going into this new territory is now suddenly limited to only the factors that we we actually touch so if we expand expand this a bit and this is I see somewhat readable on the page we can fill in the matrix for France and look at the way they're doing taxes so economic they have different tax rules than the Netherlands so we need to figure out where our product might fall into maybe our software doesn't handle multiple tax rates well so we might need to update this and we can make fill in this matrix and figure out which parts might hurt and which parts might benefit which parts might need to change which parts can stay the same and we can do the same thing for the UK and suddenly we see in the UK we need to do a lot more stuff and we can compare these two in how much investment will it take to get into this new UK territory as opposed to the Dutch or the French territory and it's a bit hard like to going in depth for all of these so to simplify this a bit I've also made a sheet where you can take just the external and the internal factors how is the company internally going to deal with these kind of issues and you can score them and you can do this very rapidly for like ungod feeling for a lot of territories and find out which are like immediate no-goes or which need a lot of attention as opposed to the ones that might be easier to get into I think that's it I don't know how it's been