Shopify is revolutionary. With Reach, it’s even better.
Reach is the top ecommerce payments provider that provides assistance every step of the way to allow merchants to appeal to a broader global market.
Shopify has revolutionized ecommerce, offering capabilities that merchants could only dream of just a few years ago. Now in the time of global pandemic, Shopify has become indispensable. Every merchant is now in the business of ecommerce. And, whether they know it or not, every merchant is global, too. That’s where Reach comes in.
Shopify has made going global astoundingly easy. Its drag and drop functionalities have made ecommerce incredibly simple for merchants to simply focus on what they do best: selling their products. And once a website is launched, anyone can find it, from anywhere in the world. Instantly global.
Peeling back the layers a bit, we can see the many complexities of owning and operating a global online business that Shopify has taken care of for merchants, including:
- Theme designs that enhance both user and store owner experience
- Infinite server scalability
- A massive ecosystem of plug-and-play apps
Merchants can add vendor integrations, service providers, and marketing tools with the click of a button. Shopify is holding steady as the leading platform in the online retail space, and one that is constantly raising the bar for competitors, too.
It’s hard to think of ways to improve on Shopify, right?
Well, the seamless global experience merchants are striving for hits a bit of speed bump with cross-border transactions.
Keeping Cross-border Transactions Affordable
Cross-border transactions inhabit their own universe in the online world, and it’s one that remains largely unexplored as other concerns often feel more pressing to merchants. And they are! At least initially.
Once a merchant is solidly positioned online and seeks to really set its global roots, cross-border transactions start to nibble and then gnaw at ROI. Nimble brands find Reach before their ROI has been chiseled and chipped at. Most companies, once they go global, are desperate to catch up to the financial benchmarks of their domestic market. Reach helps merchants get ahead in this global game. We’re one of those handy vendor integrations that Shopify loves to offer merchants. We offer a complementary and crucial service – one that no one else can. It’s the Merchant of Record processing model.
We’ll get to what that is in a moment, but to put it in context, there are two areas to consider when it comes to cross-border transactions: multi-currency options and local processing. We’ll explore each in turn.
Merchants Must Have Multi-currency Capabilities
Shopify offers multi-currency processing of approximately 130 currencies, and merchants can choose which to offer on their site. Shopify accepts Visa, Mastercard, or Amex as payment. They do not accept Paypal. And there are a host of other payment varieties in the world that consumers want to use, but cannot.
It gets sticky when merchants want to create fixed prices per currency, to account for a variety of other associated costs they would like to bake into their pricing model. So for example, a store may want to offer a pair of jeans at 10,000 Yen in Japan every time, and 100 pounds in the UK every time, to every customer in those markets. To create those fixed prices, Shopify offers Expansion Stores.
Adding Expansion Stores Doesn’t Cut It
An Expansion Store is a replica of a Shopify storefront that’s tailored to a specific locale. And the wider your net is cast, the more expansions you must create in order to accommodate consumers. If you’re serving 20 separate markets, you need 20 stores. If this sounds like a lot of extra work, well, that’s because it is.
And there’s an additional headache – merchants cannot map expansion stores to the same backend. Without this ability, keeping multiple concurrent storefronts consistently updated as actual “expansions” of each other is excruciatingly detailed and time-consuming work.
The challenge goes beyond this. It’s not just about merchants having pricing flexibility, nor is it about offering relevant payment options to the consumer side. There’s a missing link that’s discovered once a merchant really gets moving with its global operation – one that creates an ever-widening hole in both logistics and ROI: local processing.
Local Processing is The Missing Link
Local governments worldwide want a piece of the ecommerce pie. As a result, we see customs cracking down on duties and taxes worldwide – this is something many brands have not taken into account, and it’s affecting their conversion and retention rates (not to mention their ROI!).
Opening up local shops in every market they service is not a viable option for most merchants, so they’re stuck absorbing cross-border fees or charging rates that put them at a pricing disadvantage against local competitors.
Payments and logistics are the fundamental pillars of global ecommerce, each of them with nuances that are specific to the type of merchant and what demographic and region it’s targeting.
Resolving Those Pain Points with Reach
Reach saves merchants from having to manage a separate storefront domain for every international currency – we decrease operational complexity. Everything can live efficiently on one Shopify site.
This also removes the need for all of the ancillary domain management activities that come with multiple sites, including separate management of price books, inventory, marketing campaigns, SEO, administration, and support for each international storefront.
Reach is unique in the industry in its ability to offer Shopify merchants a single localized checkout for all international transactions. It’s a seamless, integrated checkout experience with robust data analytics, and the most competitive pricing in the industry.
How does Reach do it?
With our Merchant of Record model. Reach acts as the local processor for merchants. We offer consumers the local payment options that make sense for them, and remove the logistical and financial worries that typically accompany global purchases.
And we also have global fraud solutions that keep merchants ahead of fraudsters and whatever scam du jour that might be headed their way.
We simplify and accelerate retailers’ access to eager global consumers and significantly increase sales. Shopify is revolutionary. With Reach, you can go even further.
Find out more info about our comprehensive platform designed specifically for Shopify retailers.