For merchants looking to sell outside of their own country, integrating with country-specific currencies, languages, payments methods, tax and customs requirements and logistics can make the process beyond tedious. But what if there was a “commerce as a service” platform that made enabling cross border commerce as easy as managing a CRM database? In a recent podcast interview, BlueSnap CEO Ralph Dangelmaier sat down with MPD CEO Karen Webster to discuss how “commerce as a service” could eliminate any excuse merchants have about not being able to do business cross border.
For merchants looking to sell in multiple areas of the world, integrating with country-specific accounting systems, shopping carts, tax providers, and shipping can make the process beyond tedious. BlueSnap has therefore set out to unravel this dilemma by enabling cross-border service platform to help merchants expand quickly and easily across the globe. BlueSnap CEO Ralph Dangelmaier spoke with MPD CEO Karen Webster about why merchants really have no excuse anymore not to cross borders.
KW: Let’s start by talking about your recent news with respect to the Magento and Prestashop. You’ say you’ve reinvented the shopping cart experience for them – how did you do that?
RD: We’ve created really simple plugins for Magento and Prestashop that enable merchants to, using these eCommerce platforms, easily sell in 180 countries. They also allow BlueSnap’s templates to be configured without any real development, just configuration.
KW: So what can these merchants do today that they weren’t able to do before?
RD: They can configure into pre-populated or pre-formatted checkout templates that allow people to sell globally, in any language, in any currency and to accept local payments methods. Before, the merchant had to code to these different checkout areas of the world through a series of APIs. That takes quite a bit of time and adds cost. The plugins allow the process to go a lot easier and a lot quicker.
KW: This sounds to be like “x-border commerce as a service” You agree?
RD: Yes, we want to give the merchants options. Today, the merchant’s only option is to build everything themselves through a series of APIs – they have to build checkout pages and integrate into accounting systems, shopping carts, tax providers, and shipping companies. We’re trying to have the integrations pre-bundled for the merchant, out of the box, so that they can assemble and configure them the way they want.
KW: So this sort of sounds like the Salesforce model, is that the right analogy here?
RD: Yeah, I think that’s a great analogy. If you look at how Salesforce started off, they did one thing very well, like BlueSnap does global acquiring well. Then they plugged a lot of modules together, pre-integrated, so that you can get everything you want when you need it, buying on demand. That’s what BlueSnap s trying to do – be the same type of cross border commerce solution for merchants.
KW: How easy is it really?
RD: We’ve laid out four simple steps on our site, which are to download the shopping cart, register with the configurations that we provide, load the configurations, and then test them. They can get it up and running within a day.
KW: So you may be right … if a merchant is truly interested in doing business cross-border, there aren’t any excuses anymore.
RD: That’s what we like to say. We talk to merchants all the time, and a lot of research out there shows that the 25 percent of current ecommerce merchants that are trying to sell cross-border are full of excuses on why it’s too difficult. We’re trying to provide no excuses to sell overseas – our part in helping the global economy.
To listen to the full discussion of how “commerce as a service” is applied cross border, CLICK HERE.
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