Selling products to ecommerce customers in the USA
One of our specialities is building ecommerce sites that maximise a business’s profitability. We’ve been working with Iron Heart International to help them overcome a number of challenges with selling their products to customers in the US.
If you are thinking of marketing and selling your products to the USA via an ecommerce website, you will need to make a few adjustments to how your store works.
Iron Heart had been selling internationally via their ironheart.co.uk website, which had built up a sizeable following in America. But it came to their attention that a large number of card payments were being declined for their USA customers, leading to much frustration.
They talked to numerous credit card processor companies about rectifying the issue and, despite claims that they could solve the problem, there were still a proportion of card payments being declined.
This not only led to lost sales, but also significant additional costs in the extra time needed to handle customer service requests and trying to convert them to successful transactions.
After further investigation, it became apparent that American credit cards are not automatically enabled for international use and the cardholder is required to authorise them. But most customers are unaware of this.
Many Americans tend to buy domestically, so this doesn’t usually affect them. But with Iron Heart being a highly desirable brand available from a limited number outlets in the USA, the website is the only place to buy many of their products.
Even PayPal, which you’d expect to be more universally acceptable, was a concern because it handles the payments differently depending if you are a registered UK or USA merchant.
Additionally, USA-based customers were occasionally being charged a cross-border processing fee by their card provider when buying from the UK site, causing unexpected additional costs for the customer.
The Solution
In order for the credit cards to be charged domestically, Iron Heart needed an American business entity with a USA bank account. This meant the facilitation of a new payment gateway linked to this bank. To avoid allowing customers outside of the USA use this, our advice was to create a new American online store… so we set to work on ironheartamerica.com.
Setting up a new legal business entity and bank account as a non-US resident is a lengthy process. It requires a physical presence in the USA to sign documents and have your documents verified. The process of this is outside of Cloud Construct remit, but there are service providers that can help you with this.
As a heavily customised version of PrestaShop is used as the ecommerce engine, it already supported most of these features. It was a matter of configuring the multistore, customising the hosting environment and testing it using VPNs to appear to be visiting from different locations in the world.
Building a duplicate ecommerce store was not as simple as copy and pasting from the original store! There were several requirements to meet, including:
- Separate payment gateways for each store, the USA store using the USA Bank and a USA PayPal account.
- Shared products – the business didn’t want the admin, overheads and complexity of managing two stores, with duplicated product maintenance.
- We needed to create one admin panel to log in to, with shared customers and orders.
- Product stock quantity needed to be shared over both stores, so it was not possible to sell an item twice.
- Customers would not need to register on both sites, and their existing logins can be used on either.
- Different delivery options on each site.
- Detection of the visitor’s country location and being able to offer a choice of default store for future visits.
- Ability to switch between stores.
- Google Analytics separation to analyse marketing efforts in different territories.
- Unique content for the homepage targeted to American campaigns.
- Products and categories can be enabled for either site or both – which is useful for license restricted products.
- Removal of Euro and GBP currencies leaving only USD on the American site.
The Results
The implementation of ironheartamerica.com has been a great success with an increase in successful payments, and happier customers who will have a higher perceived trust buying from a native USA entity. We have helped Iron Heart to grow their sales and improved their global web presence.
If you need help transforming your ecommerce site, feel free to get in touch with our team without obligation on 01952 898626.
Building a duplicate ecommerce store was not as simple as copy and pasting from the original store! There were several requirements to meet, including:
- Separate payment gateways for each store, the USA store using the USA Bank and a USA PayPal account.
- Shared products – the business didn’t want the admin, overheads and complexity of managing two stores, with duplicated product maintenance.
- We needed to create one admin panel to log in to, with shared customers and orders.
- Product stock quantity needed to be shared over both stores, so it was not possible to sell an item twice.
- Customers would not need to register on both sites, and their existing logins can be used on either.
- Different delivery options on each site.
- Detection of the visitor’s country location and being able to offer a choice of default store for future visits.
- Ability to switch between stores.
- Google Analytics separation to analyse marketing efforts in different territories.
- Unique content for the homepage targeted to American campaigns.
- Products and categories can be enabled for either site or both – which is useful for license restricted products.
- Removal of Euro and GBP currencies leaving only USD on the American site.
