Global Ecommerce Checklist: What Your Store Needs Before Selling Abroad

Selling abroad is not a setting you switch on. An online store that works at home can fail in a new country for reasons that have nothing to do with the product: a price shown in the wrong currency, a payment method customers do not use, a parcel held for duties nobody mentioned. This checklist is the list of those reasons.

Start with one market, not "international"

"We ship worldwide" is a statement about your courier. Selling in a country means its currency, its payment habits, its tax and its expectations about delivery. Pick the one market where you already have evidence — orders that arrived anyway, enquiries, visitors in your analytics — and complete the list for it before starting a second.

The checklist

Prices and currency

Show prices in the customer's currency from the first page, not only at checkout. Decide whether each market has fixed prices you set, or prices converted from your home currency — fixed prices look deliberate and do not move every day; converted ones are less work. Either way, charge in the currency you displayed.

Tax and duties: say it before checkout

Tax works differently in each market. The UK charges VAT at a standard rate of 20%, the UAE at 5% and Saudi Arabia at 15%. In the USA, sales tax is set by each state and many local jurisdictions add their own, so stores usually calculate it through a service such as Avalara or TaxJar rather than hard-coding rates.

Import duties are separate from tax. Either you collect them at checkout and the parcel arrives with nothing to pay, or the customer pays the carrier on delivery. Both are workable. What loses orders is the customer finding out at the door.

Payments, market by market

A checkout that offers only international cards works for some of these and fails for others. In Saudi Arabia, a store without mada is missing most of its customers.

Shipping, delivery promises and returns

State a delivery time per market that you can actually meet, and send tracking automatically. Decide early whether you ship every order from home or hold stock closer to the customer; the second is faster and costs more to run.

Returns need the same attention. A customer abroad wants to know where the parcel goes back to, who pays for it and how long the refund takes. If international returns are not practical for your product, say so plainly on the product page rather than in the terms.

Language and local detail

• Arabic storefronts are laid out right to left, which changes the design rather than just the text.
• Sizes, weights and units match what the market uses.
• Address forms accept local formats — not every country has a postcode or a state.
• Phone fields accept international numbers.
• Product pages answer the questions that market asks; the product page checklist covers the basics.

Legal pages and customer data

Each market has its own rules on personal data, and they affect your privacy notice, your consent banner and sometimes where data is stored. Your returns and terms pages should state which country's customers they apply to. Take advice once per market rather than copying another store's policy.

One back office behind every market

Several storefronts or currencies should still draw on one stock count and one order list. Otherwise the last unit sells twice, in two countries. The same applies if you also sell on marketplaces such as Amazon or Noon.

This is usually where the platform decision is made. Shopify vs WooCommerce vs a custom storefront compares the options, and inventory management software covers the stock side.

The order to launch in

We build stores for specific markets rather than for "international" — see e-commerce for the UAE and e-commerce for Saudi Arabia. If you are deciding where to sell next, tell us what you sell and where the enquiries come from and we will go through this list with you.