Friday, October 20, 2006

Going International With Your Home Business

For those home business owners lucky enough to survive the
first two years, at some point, you might be contacted by
someone internationally who's heard about your business. Let's
face it, once youve conquered your local area and done business
by post or email with other areas of the country, dipping a toe
into international markets seems like the next logical step.

1. Costs Increase

If you are considering exporting a physical product, you have
to understand that your costs can significantly increase. Thus,
your products should be made as light as possible for the
purposes of international shipping. Check that youd be able to
get the things youre selling to the place where you plan to
sell them without it becoming prohibitively expensive. Next,
check if there are any customs requirements. Sometimes even the
most well planned international businesses flop because they
fail to take into account local laws or customs. s

2. Non Physibal Products

The best kind of product you can sell is a digital one, because
the only cost of distribution is your bandwidth. Of course, you
still need to worry about currency fluctuations. You therefore
might want to price your products in the currency of your
country. Non physical products are often called bits on a wire
products.

3. Maintain A Niche For Your Business

Regardless of your product, be sure that it caters to a niche
customer base. In other words, make sure there is a market for
your product in the country before doing anything. Disney, for
example, made the mistake of opening amusement parks in
countries that held strong anti-american sentiments. The parks
performed extremely poorly. Fast food giant KFC fails horribly
in China, where the general population never eats such huge
meals and avoids eating anything with their hands and finds it
offensive to be served food in buckets. If youre not sure, you
could talk to a few local businesspeople about how they think
your product would be perceived, and they may be able to
suggest a suitable target market for you.

4. Produce Internationally As Well

If the cost of distributing overseas appears to be too
expensive, you will want to investigate the possibility of
producing your product on international soil to eliminate that
cost. At the same time, if you do this, you may be able to take
advantage of hiring international workers that will work for
less, and purchase international materials that will also be
cheaper.

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