December 9, 2005
Spanish Speakers Find Christmas Place on the Web
By George Anderson
The combination of a growing Hispanic population and a study from Internet Retailer that showed many Latinos are going online to buy things was enough to convince management at The Christmas Place it needed a Spanish language web site.
Carolyn Fairbank Biggs, chief operating officer of The Christmas Place, told the Knoxville News Sentinel, “We have been monitoring the growth of Hispanics using Web sites. They continue to prefer to interact in Spanish.”
Faye Hughes, marketing coordinator for the Pigeon Forge, Tenn. retailer, said the store draws shoppers from around the world and many of those are from countries where Spanish is the official language. In those places, Christmas is a 12-day celebration beginning on Dec. 25.
The company has already begun receiving orders from outside the U.S. for its holiday goods.
To accommodate the many shoppers who come from outside Tennessee to shop there, The Christmas Place is building a hotel across from its store.
“We have many repeat customers who enjoy the look and feel of our store, and we felt we could create a hospitality experience similar to the experience of the Christmas Place,” said Ms. Biggs.
Moderator’s Comment: Are U.S. retailers taking advantage of global selling opportunities through their web sites? What are some of the challenges and
opportunities of trying to serve shoppers outside the U.S.? –
George Anderson – Moderator
BrainTrust
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Discussion Questions
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Many web sites don’t even ship to Alaska and Hawaii, much less foreign countries. And many web sites that will ship to foreign countries don’t communicate it on the home page. If the customer is willing to pay the freight, why not? The customer pays the customs duty, if any, not the retailer. Any extra sale is likely to be profitable, since fixed costs are already paid. Furthermore, translating a site isn’t as expensive as creating one from scratch. The big expenses would be marketing and fraud.
Not offering websites in multiple languages is one of the greatest tragedies of US retailing today. The number 1 rule of Internet retailing is that when you have a website on the Internet, you are global. To ignore the rest of the world, let alone the diverse populations which live in the Americas is a tragedy, and a poor business decision which most US retailers make. This reflects our tendency to think of the US as our only market and to ignore our Canadian French and Latin-American Spanish/Portugese neighbors, let alone the rest of the world. To truly take advantage of our diverse retail opportunities, we need to think that everyone will be reading (and possibly purchasing) from our website. This will require at least 6 language support (French, English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, German) and is very simple to do. Just place a country flag representing each of these languages with the language name written in the native tongue (i.e. Espagnol for Spanish, not “Spanish”) as a hotlink to your foreign-translated web pages. There are many great 3rd party expeditors who will handle all of the logistics from a global perspective, so that these don’t have to require an “in-house” team. For a few thousand dollars, any company could (and should) be global. Ignoring these opportunities is one of the greatest failures of US business today.
Only 5% of the world’s consumers are in the US. If you have a website, anyone in the world has access to your company. Yes, there is a learning curve. With 95% of the world’s consumers outside the US, the opportunities are worth the learning curve.
It’s about time we had this discussion and more than about time American companies took note. As has been pointed out, translating shouldn’t be an insurmountable object but, more to the point, it isn’t always necessary. There are millions of people, especially this time of year, wanting to send gifts to people in the US. So overseas shipping isn’t an issue either. One major obstacle, which I have encountered numerous times and which Doc attempted to explain away last time it came up is that poor iddle Americans can’t cope with non-American credit card payments because we might have more potential fraudsters than you super-honest guys do. ****** is all I can say to that. If you have a business and want to sell products then you should look at all the potential markets. It infuriates me to have such trouble buying from American companies.
Alaska is also an issue for me because my daughter lives there and the number of websites that have trapped me in a loop, going through the whole order procedure and claiming, in their terms and conditions that they will deliver but then refusing to when I finally come to checkout also drives me mad.
So…once more for the record…many American websites really need to get their act together, wake up and recognise that they are driving away many many many potential customers.
Kai, your comments really get to the heart of the matter for me. Retailers truly need to expand their mindset in terms of seeking new opportunities in the global village. Like it or not folks, the global village is where we all reside in the 21st century.
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Many web sites don’t even ship to Alaska and Hawaii, much less foreign countries. And many web sites that will ship to foreign countries don’t communicate it on the home page. If the customer is willing to pay the freight, why not? The customer pays the customs duty, if any, not the retailer. Any extra sale is likely to be profitable, since fixed costs are already paid. Furthermore, translating a site isn’t as expensive as creating one from scratch. The big expenses would be marketing and fraud.
Not offering websites in multiple languages is one of the greatest tragedies of US retailing today. The number 1 rule of Internet retailing is that when you have a website on the Internet, you are global. To ignore the rest of the world, let alone the diverse populations which live in the Americas is a tragedy, and a poor business decision which most US retailers make. This reflects our tendency to think of the US as our only market and to ignore our Canadian French and Latin-American Spanish/Portugese neighbors, let alone the rest of the world. To truly take advantage of our diverse retail opportunities, we need to think that everyone will be reading (and possibly purchasing) from our website. This will require at least 6 language support (French, English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, German) and is very simple to do. Just place a country flag representing each of these languages with the language name written in the native tongue (i.e. Espagnol for Spanish, not “Spanish”) as a hotlink to your foreign-translated web pages. There are many great 3rd party expeditors who will handle all of the logistics from a global perspective, so that these don’t have to require an “in-house” team. For a few thousand dollars, any company could (and should) be global. Ignoring these opportunities is one of the greatest failures of US business today.
Only 5% of the world’s consumers are in the US. If you have a website, anyone in the world has access to your company. Yes, there is a learning curve. With 95% of the world’s consumers outside the US, the opportunities are worth the learning curve.
It’s about time we had this discussion and more than about time American companies took note. As has been pointed out, translating shouldn’t be an insurmountable object but, more to the point, it isn’t always necessary. There are millions of people, especially this time of year, wanting to send gifts to people in the US. So overseas shipping isn’t an issue either. One major obstacle, which I have encountered numerous times and which Doc attempted to explain away last time it came up is that poor iddle Americans can’t cope with non-American credit card payments because we might have more potential fraudsters than you super-honest guys do. ****** is all I can say to that. If you have a business and want to sell products then you should look at all the potential markets. It infuriates me to have such trouble buying from American companies.
Alaska is also an issue for me because my daughter lives there and the number of websites that have trapped me in a loop, going through the whole order procedure and claiming, in their terms and conditions that they will deliver but then refusing to when I finally come to checkout also drives me mad.
So…once more for the record…many American websites really need to get their act together, wake up and recognise that they are driving away many many many potential customers.
Kai, your comments really get to the heart of the matter for me. Retailers truly need to expand their mindset in terms of seeking new opportunities in the global village. Like it or not folks, the global village is where we all reside in the 21st century.