NETTING IT OUT

How would you like to be able to market, merchandise, sell, and deliver your products to potential customers in Europe and Canada?

If you’re a U.S.-based ecommerce merchant, then FiftyOne might be just what you need.

It’s a software and services offering that can make it easy for international customers to do business with you and easy for you to do business with them. FiftyOne extends your existing ecommerce system to customers wishing to pay in Euros, British pounds, or Canadian dollars, with comprehensive support for checkout, fulfillment, and customer service.

FiftyOne was introduced in 2007 by New York City-based, privately held E4X. To date, 25 organizations, many of them very recognizable brands, have licensed and deployed the offering. Founded in 1999, E4X got its start by offering electronic foreign exchange services. On the Customers.com report card for B2C ecommerce, FiftyOne addresses most requirements and exceeds requirements for purchasing services and notifications. It needs improvement in analytic functionality.

We recommend FiftyOne for any U.S. merchant with revenues up to $1 billion who wishes to promote their brand and offer their products to international customers. FiftyOne offers good value and low risk. It can be and has been implemented quite quickly.

FIFTYONE

Making It Easy for International Customers to Do Online Business with U.S. Retailers

Shoppers outside the United States want to buy the brands of U.S. retailers because U.S. retailers offer the products that they want to buy—products that they can’t buy locally. U.S. retailers want to approach the market of international consumers because they want to grow their business by marketing, merchandising, and selling to a very large group of consumers who want to buy their products.

Despite a very large market opportunity, U.S. retailers face large obstacles in approaching international customers:

• Localization. International customers want to do business in their language and their currency. Translating ecommerce Web content and catalog content can be difficult and time consuming work. This work is ongoing as merchants must maintain these translations across marketing and merchandising campaigns and seasonal product changes. And the work is exactly proportional to the number of locales that a retailer wishes to support. Localization also involves the presentation of relevant content while suppressing irrelevant content: country-specific FAQs, contact information, policies, SKUs, and promotions, for example. Sound hard? Localization is, in fact, the easiest issue to address in international ecommerce.
• Checkout. Checkout for domestic customers means collecting payment method, shipping and billing addresses, and shipping methods, adding sales tax, if applicable, applying order-based promotions, and calculating an order total. In the United States, there are well known and universally used payment and shipping methods and networks. Payment authorization is virtually automatic. Every shipper serves every possible address. International checkout is much more complicated. For example, payment fraud detection is more complex internationally because there are no public databases and limited or absent AVS (Address Verification System) infrastructure. Also, certain types of products are restricted from import by country—alcohol, event tickets, and phone cards, to name a few. There are country-specific customs duties and value added taxes (VAT) instead of sales taxes. Payment methods are not universal, and shippers don’t necessarily serve every country and every address. In addition, merchants must learn to manage currency exchange risks and register for tax in each of the countries that they serve.
• Fulfillment. Fulfillment to domestic customers is picking, packaging, handing off to the selected shipper, and tracking, typically using the shipper’s tracking system. Fulfillment to international customers is complicated by customs inspections and processing on export from the U.S. and on import into the customer’s country. Partial fulfillment in the U.S. is no big deal. Internationally, partial fulfillment may increase shipping complexity, time, and cost significantly.
• Customer service. International customers are, well, customers. They demand excellent, timely, and accurate service, all in their language. International customers want to get order status, cancel orders, and return orders and order replacement items. Returns present the same issues as fulfillment, only in reverse. Returns can also introduce reverse payment issues. Changes in currency exchange rates can result in the price that an international customer paid for a replacement item being different from the price at the time of the item’s return.

FiftyOne Makes It Easy for International Customers to Do Business with You

FiftyOne is a software and services offering from New York City-based E4X that can help U.S. ecommerce retailers address these issues and make it easy for international customers to do business with them. Why 51? According to ErX’s Nolin LeChasseur, “the product is called FiftyOne because it enables a U.S. retailer to leverage the same infrastructure it uses to serve the fifty U.S. States when it extends its service to one world—so Fifty states to One world.”

FiftyOne provides a high-value, low-cost, low-risk way to bring the two groups (U.S. e-tailers and international customers) together. FiftyOne complements existing ecommerce systems by adding support for locale detection, currency exchange rate, checkout for international customers, shipping logistics, and post-checkout customer service. They do not yet offer translation services for localization, but plan to do so.

In Table A, we list and describe those international customer activities that FiftyOne supports, describe what services and content that FiftyOne provides, and explain how those services and content complement and enhance a retailer’s ecommerce system.

Support for International Customers’ Ecommerce Activities

Download the PDF to see the table.

Table A. In this table, we list and describe an international customer’s ecommerce activities. We explain how an ecommerce merchant typically supports them and show how FiftyOne supports the international customer and the ecommerce merchant.

Pretty good, eh? FiftyOne takes care of just about all of the issues supporting international customers that we described above—localization, checkout, fulfillment, and customer service. From the time an international customer lands on a merchant’s ecommerce site through the creation of and confirmation of an order, FiftyOne provides services, data, and content that integrate very tightly with ecommerce systems. From the international customer’s perspective, fulfillment activities are handled by FiftyOne, and the customer service activities related to fulfillment are delivered by FiftyOne software services for self-service and by the ecommerce merchant’s CSRs using FiftyOne software services for assisted-service.

FiftyOne deploys as a package of hosted, multi-tenant, on-demand software services and manual logistics services for shipping orders from a U.S. distribution hub to international customers and for processing returns from international customers. E4X also offers the professional service to help integrate FiftyOne with your existing ecommerce system. Retailers pay for FiftyOne as a percentage of online sales.

E4X introduced FiftyOne in 2007. To date 25 organizations have licensed and deployed it. Recognizable among FiftyOne’s customers are companies such as Overstock.com, drugstore.com, and Saks Fifth Avenue.

E4X was founded in 1999. It’s a privately held firm with a staff of 45 and corporate headquarters in New York and a development organization in Tel Aviv, Israel. The firm’s first offering was a foreign currency exchange service that is still being offered today and is a component of FiftyOne.

EVALUATING E4X FIFTYONE

In this report we evaluate E4X FiftyOne against a subset of our framework for B2C ecommerce . The complete framework has evaluation criteria for the following ...