Payvision publishes results of industrys biggest cross border ecommerce survey

After tracking three years of solid growth, cross-border ecommerce uptake by respondents to Payvision’s 2016 edition of this global survey is flat. This waning appetite for cross border ecommerce by merchants links directly to the unstable political and economic landscape in 2016.

This includes a complicated UK extraction from the EU, a downturn in the Chinese economy, and a controversial presidential election campaign in the US, implying future tariffs on US trade with China and the withdrawal of the US from the TTP.

Merchants confessed they are unclear but concerned about the implications of this current instability. They report, as a consequence, more preference for doing cross border business with consumers of shared languages and cultures this year, deeming other markets to be riskier. This is despite the increasing influence of the millennial, global consumer.

“The omnichannel consumer mindset is quite the opposite of merchants’.” explains Gijs op de Weegh, Chief Operating Officer at Payvision. “Consider Alibaba’s Singles’ Day, the largest revenue-driving ecommerce day in the world. This year, it generated nearly $18 billion in sales in China, and almost a third of this was driven by foreign purchases. With a maturing set of millennial consumers, with more and more disposable income, the modern shopper is no longer domestic or cross-border, neither mobile nor in-store, they are everywhere.”

Merchants agreed that modern consumers are always connected, shopping on their own terms, through multiple channels. So, when asked about omnichannel capabilities, 55% of respondents answered that they currently offer omnichannel retail and a further 41% plan to offer it in the near future.

Despite catering to this global, omnichannel shopper, merchants are still warier of selling cross-border than in previous years. This could be explained, in part, by the hurdles that merchants are facing when expanding into new markets. According to the survey, almost 50% of merchants find overseas regulation the biggest pain point, despite governmental efforts to lower barriers to entry in key markets such as China. Without a knowledgeable partner to navigate local legalities and localization, cross-border ecommerce can be a fruitless exercise.

The survey also revealed the growth of mobile commerce as the biggest game changer to cross border trade for the third year running, selected by over 24%. Payvision’s fourth annual cross border ecommerce report includes in-depth cross-border data, online payment preferences and trends in over 30 markets, establishing itself as the most thorough report on global cross-border ecommerce available.

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