How did Mobile Fun progress from the UK market to launching online stores for 27 different countries in just five years?

Founded in 2000, Mobile Fun is an online retailer of mobile phone accessories, offering a product range of more than 7,000 globally-sourced products.

With a steady stream of orders from Germany, we decided to open our first international office and website in Hamburg in 2008. We now have 27 international websites in total and ship products to 50 countries worldwide. We are not stopping there – we have also opened offices in Australia, France, Spain and the USA, with further locations in the pipeline. Each of our websites has experienced immediate growth and this success has taken our international business close to 50% of our overall revenue.

Despite this achievement, international expansion was not without its pitfalls. Localisation is critical to success and every expansion has to consider local language, products, preferred payment options and delivery. Even with a great product range, treating Europe – for example – as a homogenous unit is a big mistake. We have learned that understanding varying purchasing, payment and delivery preferences is extremely important.

Before expanding worldwide, we assessed each market's potential by understanding existing international sales, internet penetration and smartphone growth, along with consideration of our existing language base. Our next steps were to identify emerging markets by considering growth opportunities not just for mobile accessories, but also e-commerce growth in general.

Vitally, we needed to understand if our products fit the target countries, so we carried out a thorough assessment of the market opportunity for mobile accessories and mobile device penetration. While we have an advantage here, with the global reach of smartphones and tablets, we must also consider products for local devices that are specific to each new country.

We sought advice from bodies such as the UKTI and planned ahead for regulatory and legal compliance issues. These organisations were also helpful in identifying any tax relief or grants available.

Local teams or native language speakers are critical to success, not only because of language but essential local market and e-commerce knowledge. However, there needs to be a balance between risk and investment required to establish a local office. Although we opened offices in Germany and France, in smaller markets such as Spain and the Netherlands, we mitigated set-up risks by bringing country managers to the UK until the sites were established. We now have an office in Bilbao, Spain, but although our Dutch website is now well-established, it has proven to be more cost effective to continue its operation from our UK head office. Having that flexibility in our approach has been important.

Of course, it is possible to enter countries without people on the ground. However, finding and retaining the right people is a key challenge. An international team that shares best practice, has access to training, benefits and a structured career path, all of which have been pivotal to our success. We use a blended model of teams on the ground in established markets and foreign nationals working out of our UK offices to set up new territories. International teams provide localisation services, in terms of language nuances and country knowledge. Trying to acquire this information from the UK is expensive and time consuming.

In parallel to identifying countries and finding the right people, our in-house IT team had their work cut out when developing a robust IT framework that could be rolled out across multiple geographies. We set up 22 new international websites in the last financial year alone. Having refined our IT framework during early international website rollouts, we are now able to launch new sites within a matter of days rather than weeks.

Finally, partnerships have also helped us to generate almost 50% of revenue through international sales. Shipping products internationally can be complicated. We have a European warehouse in Birmingham and are working with couriers to get our products out quickly while being competitively priced against in-country competitors. We also ensure that we have a transparent international returns policy.

The world is getting smaller and for companies willing to expand internationally, Europe is just the first port of call. We see the US, South America and Australia representing lucrative markets for UK companies as there is huge demand and, even with a small slice of the pie, a good profit is possible. Further expansion can, of course, present logistical and administrative challenges, such as export duties, taxes and changes in business structure, to provide high quality customer service. Europe, with a population of over 800 million, is a lucrative e-commerce market right on our doorstep, but there are also great opportunities further afield.

Richard Moore is the head of international at Mobile Fun

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