Evan Carmichael explains why Americans hesitate to buy from foreign sellers and how to fix it. Show prices in US dollars, display shipping costs and delivery times upfront, and build credibility with reviews and sales history. Start on eBay to establish a reputation you can move to your own site.
Chapters
How to sell online to the American market. If you're starting a business online and you want to get people buying from you, the US is a great market to target. Huge consumer base, lots of money to spend, but you have to make it easy for them to do it and reduce the risk. If you're looking at an American buyer, and I've sold to the US, and I'm from Canada, I'm not American, but I've sold a lot into the US. If you're from the US and you're selling to the US, it's a lot easier. There's a lot less fear. As soon as you're asking somebody to buy from a country outside of their own, it increases the fear, it increases the uncertainty, and so you have to do a good job in reducing that fear and giving them more certainty if you want to be able to make more sales. I got a question from one of my readers on YouTube, iSquashFools. That's his name. Anyway. Good name. So he's an entrepreneur in South Asia, wants to create a new online store that sells clothes to the American market and wanted my advice on what to do. Should he have a store in the US? Wondering, how do I get this started? So again, you need to make this super easy for people to buy from you. And the biggest issues that I've had in looking at products that are overseas and deciding whether to buy them or not have been: one, do I understand the pricing? So I almost never buy anything that that's outside US or Canada online unless I really, really, really, really, really have to have it and nobody in North America sells it because I don't understand the pricing first of all. I don't understand what that dollar means. So if somebody's listing something in euros or in an Asian currency or any other currency, I don't know what that means to me in Canadian dollars or in US dollars and I don't want to do the work to find out unless I really love the product. So you have to make it easy. So you want to reduce the risk, you want to increase the certainty, show them how much it's going to cost in US dollars. It makes it a lot easier. The next thing is clearly show what the shipping is going to be. Another big fear is if you're buying something from a foreign market is how much it's going to cost to ship. Is it going to break my arm to pay for this huge shipping cost? Because it's going to cost more in shipping coming from another country than coming from within your own country. So make that clear. I will not buy products online because I don't know what I don't know what the shipping cost is and I don't want to go through the effort of asking the website how much is it going to cost to ship this to me. Make it easy. Show them upfront. Here's how much it's going to cost to ship to your location. And the third thing is having some kind of credibility. Right? You want to show that other people have bought from you and had success and love buying from you and that reduces the fear that you're going to screw me. Right? If I've never bought from you before and you're in a different country, I'm worried that I'm going to send you my money and you're not going to give me anything back. That's going to be a fear. So you have to get over that fear with people and show them that you are a credible source. The place that I've actually bought the most international stuff from is eBay. And one of the things that they do really well is cover those 3 areas that I talked about. So the pricing, you get the pricing in your local currency. So I know how much it's going to cost me in Canadian or US dollars to buy the product. They show me what the shipping is upfront. They tell me how much it's gonna cost to buy this product and how long is it gonna take to ship. And there is credibility built in in that they show me how many people have bought from them before, what their reviews have been before, and so I'm willing to take the leap and buy something from an Asian country or European country, a country that I've maybe never bought from before because eBay helps reduce my risk. So that's gonna be your challenge. That has to be something that you need to go through on your own side. Show me the pricing, show me the shipping, reduce my risk. It may even make sense to start on eBay to build up a profile, to build up testimonials and reviews, and build that into your website to say, here's all the success that we had on eBay, here's all the reviews and the testimonials and people love working with us, to again help reduce the fear, the uncertainty, the doubt that people will have in dealing with a country that they may not have ever bought from before. Put those strategies to work for you and you'll have a lot more success in selling to the US market. Believe. For those of you watching, like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It always makes me want to do more for you. And let me know what you think. You have a comment about this video, leave it below. Are you selling to the US market? Let me know what you think. You have a question for your business, something totally unrelated, Leave it in the comments, I'll make a response for you. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
