July 31, 2020 
The high penetration of the internet and the increase in the adoption of social media globally is rooting the need for expansion of online businesses cross-border.
According to the recent study reports that cross-border eCommerce is supposed to reach 424 billion dollars by 2021, almost around 15% of total online business activity. By 2022, it will make up to 20% of the eCommerce cross-border.
Overview
The manufacturers, retailers, brand owners from across countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand are actively participating in increasing their online commerce cross-border.
But for international eCommerce to be successful, there are certain challenges to overcome such as efficient order processing, shipment, pricing, payment management, and many more.
For this, they require help from industry experts like eCommerce enablers. Ecommerce enablers are a one-stop solution that is, they provide clients with whatever they need to sell online.
And with the expansion of eCommerce cross-border, the number of online marketplaces they require to cover has increased twofold.
Let us see how eCommerce enablers are expanding online businesses cross-border.
Multi-Channel Management
It is evolving the online business in many ways. Ecommerce retailers, brands, distributors need to manage orders, payments, inventory manually across the marketplace, causing inaccuracies and delays.
With so many marketplaces and web stores in different regions to cover, businesses tend to make costly mistakes. To manage all these channels efficiently, the eCommerce enablers focus on the following areas of operations:
Consolidate Data
Consolidation of the order or customer data allows your business to manage all multi-channel data to help improve the efficiency of your order flow.
Furthermore, the combination of your data helps to eradicate order and inventory errors. This in consideration, adds value to customer service engagements and develops customer trust in your brand.
Erase Manual Process
Manual processing of data is exhausting and increases the rate of inaccuracy. Eliminating your manual processes will help to manage time and resources for other important tasks.
Additionally, it will also reduce operating costs and enhance your business’s time to market.
Inventory Management
Inventory management software tool automatically updates your stock levels for you in real-time, avoiding you from overselling.
Adopting real-time inventory management will help retailers to analyze and track up and downs round-the-clock of their inventory levels across multiple eCommerce stores.
Hence setting the inventory thresholds will help prevent your business from overselling and/or canceling orders.
Account and Shipping Integrations
Sometimes the little things that consume time. Shipping carrier integrations saves your time by allowing you to do simple tasks such as bulk printing shipping labels, invoices, and packing lists for all of your sales channels from one screen.
Similarly, accounting integrations enable you to automatically push cross-channel sales with the accounting software so you don’t need to do this yourself.
Easy Globalization
As per the analysis, local customers generally tend to shop from the local marketplace as it gives them ease in checking out.
But there has been noticed a tremendous rise in the international shoppers recently and if the eCommerce cross-border is not optimized based on local language, shipping or payment methods, then it can lead to the abandonment of shopping carts.
Enablers help Ecommerce to go global from local by eliminating such problems. It helps in localizing the address field-specific to a country and dynamically shows only those fields relevant to a country by providing correct terminologies for that label.
Various Shipping Options
This is an integral part of any online business looking for growth cross-border. Most of the online players lose customers on the checkout page either due to high shipping charges or limitations of shipping.
E-commerce enablers give you multiple shipping options which not only relieve sellers but also help customers happily checking out.
Manage Payment Methods
During checkout, the payment method also plays a vital role for successful order placement. Most of the customers are not willing to pay in foreign currencies may be due to trust issues, hence results in abandoning the shopping cart.
Enablers offer payments in local currency and also in local payments. So that your customers no longer have to worry regarding the currency.
Global Compliance
Every eCommerce industry needs to manage the compliance, regulatory, and reputation risks by ensuring the laws and rules of the country.
E-commerce enablers monitor change in the regulations and also make sure to secure the data. Considering the global retail eCommerce expansion, protecting consumer data has become an essential task.
More than 50 countries have data protection laws around the globe.
Apart from all these, Ecommerce enablers also provide low risk, low operation cost, accelerate sales, and speed market expansion. This shows how eCommerce enablers are expanding business online cross-border.
Summing Up
Expanding sustainable eCommerce has become the need of an hour. By partnering up with an eCommerce enabler, it not only benefits the business in the short-term but in the long run as well.
Southeast Asia has become the fourth-largest eCommerce market in the world and is still growing. Rapidly growing middle class and internet access among the young population has increased the demand.
So, this is the best time to associate with the enablers as it not only generates more revenue compared to merchant sell on single channel but also increases the profitability in multi-channel.
