Delivery : In almost all cases my packages were there within 24 hours and that is great. As a webshop you want to serve your customers as well and as quickly as possible and to Belgium you can certainly offer or even guarantee a fast delivery.
To Germany
One of the markets I wanted to serve first after Belgium was Germany. Not only did I see a lot of potential in the size of the market, they are used to ordering online. After I saw that my webshop was well received in Belgium, I immediately had my webshop and AdWords campaigns translated into German for almost €1000.
Many orders came in during the first few months and in theory everything went according to plan, however…
Returns : Because Germany is perhaps even slightly ahead of the Netherlands, they have a completely different mentality than Belgian or Dutch customers. Of the orders I processed in the first few months, at least 35 percent were partially or completely returned!
Delivery : Of the orders I sent to Germany, most packages arrived within 48 hours and some even longer. This is still manageable, but keep this in mind when communicating with customers.
After a few months of testing and processing how many numbers in singapore phone number the returns, I decided to 'stop' the German site by redirecting visitors to the English site.
In addition to translating the site into German, I immediately opted to outsource the English translations for my English-language Aikido webshop . In my opinion, it takes too much time to do everything myself and there is also too much risk of (small) language errors, which detracts from the trust that you radiate as a webshop.
At the moment I am gaining experience in other countries in Europe. Perhaps more about this in a next article!
Drive and passion is the first step
Sufficient drive and passion for a product is a good first step to start your own webshop. Determine your priorities well and constantly weigh whether something is worth it, or whether you can better invest your time in other things. It is not bad to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them and continue to improve your webshop and service every day.