Cross-Border E-Commerce Is Taking Off. Can Content Keep Up?

Pre-pandemic, online shoppers rarely looked overseas to make a purchase, with a scant 9% of e-commerce sales coming from beyond the border. Today, cross-border e-commerce represents one of the most promising segments for businesses to explore, with the size of the market projected to be $3.3 trillion by 2028—more than the GDP of India. 

Exploring new markets may fuel business growth, but it also presents risk, particularly for marketing and legal teams as they try to quickly scale content in regions with different languages, cultural preferences and compliance requirements. 

Missing a regulatory update can have a severe impact on revenue and reputation, while creating content without taking the time to understand a new audience’s preferences can result in wasted capital. 

For many companies, the rewards of scaling content to new markets outweigh the potential pitfalls. 

“Companies are realizing, ‘Hey, there are real revenue-generating opportunities out there if we’re able to meet our customers where they are,’” says Nick Switzer, a Senior Solution Engineer at Contentful. “But to do that, it’s about more than speaking the same language. It’s about using the same terminology on a granular level.” 

Even for companies operating in a single market, it can be challenging to engage audiences across a growing number of platforms and channels—from social media to wearables to home appliances. Multiply that challenge for every new market, and content teams can find themselves getting overwhelmed. As they recreate content across new systems, marketers are also likely to introduce errors—a nightmare scenario for legal and compliance, which need to ensure that content complies with local regulations. 

The Contentful Composable Content Platform alleviates those pressures by adopting a modular approach to content creation. 

An API-first platform, Contentful enables third-party integrations with popular platforms, from Shopify to SAP. Rather than drafting content from scratch, teams can simultaneously display the same content across all channels, reducing the likelihood of errors.

Contentful also employs another method that can help content teams accelerate their entrance into new markets: generative AI. The Contentful AI Content Generator can reduce the time needed for repetitive tasks like writing SEO keywords, and can also translate content into nearly 100 languages. 

Often, companies begin their localization efforts by identifying a region they want to reach and taking on the heavy lift of translating entire websites into the local language, without first doing the market research to determine which channels and products that region is most likely to respond to—or even to confirm that the region is the right target for expansion. 

Switzer says this is a mistake, and that businesses should focus on gathering data to inform their strategy. Rather than picking a single region and dedicating resources to updating a large, complex web experience all at once, he recommends targeting multiple regions of interest by testing just a few high-traffic pages at a time in three to five languages.

“It’s like A/B testing the market,” says Switzer. “If you see maybe one or two of those languages really take off, you know where to focus your efforts.” 

Switzer anticipates that emerging technologies like generative AI will soon simplify the process of scaling to new markets. While businesses can’t predict what those tools will be, they can future-proof their content structure to ease the transition. Contentful’s API-first approach allows businesses to integrate new tools as and when they launch.

It won’t be long, says Switzer, before companies’ large language models (LLMs) will communicate with their web and analytics platforms, and offer layout recommendations based on which modules or product pages users are most engaged with. 

“Soon, your AI model will help you effectively do things like one-to-one personalization, which is kind of a dream for every e-commerce retailer out there,” Switzer says.