Internationalize Your Website 5 - Use The Right Order Forms For International Sales

Last Updated 17 August 2008

Are using your website to attract international clients?

You want all of your efforts to bring you international sales, right?

There is more than one pitfall in the process of taking the online sale. Don’t forget to check all aspects of your order forms.

Establish An Easy Path To Your Order Page

The first obvious thing is to take your international visitor to your order form. Is this path clearly indicated?

• Is your order page easy to recognize as an order page?
• Is your offer clearly stated?
• Is you guarantee or return policy also clearly stated?
• Is it easy to navigate from the order page back to the offer page?

Remember, non-native English speakers may need a little bit more time to understand the process you have in place. Make it easy for them to go back and check something.

Make The Right Offer To Your International Visitors

Will your international visitor know exactly what you are offering?

Clarity and consistency are vital. Sometimes offers get so complex they are hard to follow. Revise your offer for clarity in presentation and consistency in vocabulary.

In addition to using clarity and consistency in your offer, here are a few other things to remember:

• The different forms of measurement, metric and imperial.
• Some websites are giving approximate values in US dollars if the payment is in Euros.

This shows knowledge of foreign business practices. It gives you more credibility for your international readers.The more clarity throughout the whole of your website the easier the sale will be.

Take Different Address Formats

Even when your international visitors have decided to buy your products immediately the sale can still end because your order form is not easy for international sales.

Once your international visitor is on your order form, the first major stumbling block is to have an order form easy to fill in with international addresses.

Sometimes the addresses used in some foreign postal services just don’t appear to be addresses.

Imagine how visitors feel if they were not used to filling in your style of address order form. If your computer order screen forces your international client to distort his address in a way he does not know how to, it might not be easy for him.

Many international orders are abandoned here. Simply paying attention to how the address form is presented can bring you more international sales.

• Is your address form easy to fill out? Street number come before or after the name of the street. Zip codes are placed in different places and come in various formats.
• Is your address form long enough? Postal addresses in different countries do not look the same. Some people seem to need ten lines of text, others only need two.
• Does your order form have mandatory information requirements, such as a zip code or a state? International addresses do not always have zip codes and states. Can your international buyers get around your mandatory requirements to give their accurate address?

Give A Variety Of Payment Options

If your international visitor is on your order page he probably has an international credit card in hand ready to make the purchase. You might think the rest of the transaction will be easy from this point on.

Different countries have different financial laws, regulations and processes. International payments are not always straight forward. There are a few things you can do to give your international clients options:

• Take as wide a variety of different credit cards as possible.
• Offer different payment platforms, such as PayPal. Payment platforms that work well for you locally may be more difficult to use from other countries.
• Set up payment pages using different platforms in the event your clients are having difficulties and email them the links after once they cannot use your usual page.
• If you see that an international client has tried unsuccessfully to make online payment, email him a follow up to ask if there were any problems and offer to try putting the credit card through manually.

Systematic follow up by email of abandoned payments can also bring in more international sales.

Learn To Sell Internationally

The best advice is to:

• Test the process you have in place.
• Follow up on anything out of the ordinary.
• Follow up with a simple email to offer assistance on all abandoned orders.
• Learn how the order and payment system you have in place works with your international clients.

The extra effort you make with your international clients will go a very long way in establishing great client relationships. In some instances it will lead to great word of mouth advertising in countries where you have not physical presence.


This article is part of a series to Internationalize Your Website. Here are the other articles in this series:

• 7 Easy Tips to Internationalize Your Web Site
• Internationalize Your Website 1 - Make Your Website Easy To Read For All Of Your Readers
• Internationalize Your Website 2 - Be Reachable By Phone To Everyone
• Internationalize Your Website 3 - Show The World Your Location
• Internationalize Your Website 4 - Create Clarity With A Consistent Vocabulary
• Internationalize Your Website 6 - Publish A Glossary For Clarity And Consistency
• Internationalize Your Website 7 - Welcome Your International Visitors