The E-commerce field has been growing dramatically in recent years, and was of course fostered by the Covid pandemic that brought it to levels we expected to see only around 2025.
 One of the main growth channels was the cross border trading, in fact, currently even one out of four items is purchased by foreign buyers which means that 25% of online sales are cross border sales, while the value of cross-border E-commerce is expected to exceed $2.1 trillion in 2023, increasing from $1.9 trillion in 2022.
This presents a unique opportunity for all the SMBs. Online export sales are not just an additional channel that is nice to have, but a necessary one that helps find new clients all over the world and grow your business in large scales in a relatively short time.
But like in every new field we choose to enter, there are obstacles and knowledge that needs to be gained in order to fully fulfill the potential of the opportunity presented to us.
How do we reach new clients in new countries? How do we ship our goods? How to handle the technical part of online sales and more…
This is where choosing the right channel to sell online becomes crucial. Opening an independent store of course has its advantages in terms of brand uniqueness, but will require massive budgets to market your product outside of your country of origin, in fact out of the world’s 10 biggest retail websites only 5 are independent websites owned by the largest brands in the world such as “Samasung”, “Apple” and “Ikea”.
The other 5 websites on the list are Marketplaces that present the opportunity for SMBs for a smoother entrance to global sales by providing various tools and guidance in the field in addition to the most important thing a business needs – Traffic.Â
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For example, eBay provides sellers with access to over 133 Million buyers globally in 190 markets, which is over 13 times the entire population of the United Arab Emirates. It also gives the possibility for sellers to sell to the markets with high purchasing power, such as the USA, the UK, and the EU countries where the average purchase size is way bigger than in the local markets.
In addition to a huge solvent audience, E-commerce platforms such as eBay give sellers a trustworthy brand which already has a high level of customer credibility, a convenient platform for business operations, including category insights, marketing tools and fulfillment solutions.Â
In order to increase our support in the UAE, and help as many businesses to sell all over the world on our platform, we also launched a special growth program for businesses from the region that wish to successfully sell online.
Businesses that will join the program will enjoy the help of a personal Growth Advisor at eBay within the next year, a free subscription for an eBay Store for 3 months, and auto listings service. The benefits of this program are worth thousands of dollars per participating business, and are offered completely for free for UAE small and medium businesses, that wish to succeed selling globally with eBay.Â
Given all of that, it is important to remember that selling successfully online won’t happen overnight and does not involve magic. Like every other business it requires time and constant learning and improvement to yield good and fruitful results.
