“Why 'Easy International' Is Over - and What Smart Brands Are Doing Instead” - A Pulse Commentary

In the run up to the Pulse eCommerce Summit on the 13th - 14th May 2026, we are launching a series of commentary pieces on topics that will be a focus point at the conference, led by members of the Vervaunt team. Here is our first commentary piece on internationalisation, new markets and localisation, with input from Tom Wilson.

Over the last 18 months, a combination of tariff changes, de minimis reforms, and increased import friction has made cross-border trade more complex and less predictable. What used to be a straightforward growth lever now requires closer attention to cost structures, customer experience, and operational resilience. The impact has extended beyond marketing performance into margins, fulfilment operations, and the confidence leadership teams have in international forecasts.

"The old playbook of 'launch everywhere, figure it out later' no longer works. Between evolving customs regulations, currency volatility, and rising consumer expectations for localised experiences, international expansion has become an operational gauntlet. The brands winning today are fundamentally rethinking their approach. They're treating year-one in new markets as infrastructure investment, not immediate profit centres. They're diversifying across high-growth regions rather than chasing volume in saturated markets. Most critically, they're getting the operational foundation right—localised pricing, native payment methods, and compliant duties/tax handling—before scaling. The data backs this up: merchants implementing operationally-sound international strategies are seeing 40%+ sales increases, with top performers achieving over 200% growth. The complexity hasn't disappeared—it's simply moved from a barrier to a competitive moat for those who solve it properly." - Yael Weiss, Lead Partner Solutions Engineer, Shopify

Shifting from single-market concentration to portfolio thinking

The most significant change we've observed is how brands are thinking about market diversification.

Historically, UK-based brands treated the US as the primary export market. Large addressable market, English language, cultural proximity - for many brands, it was the obvious first choice. But over the last 18 months, tariff changes, de minimis reforms, and import regulation shifts have introduced cost volatility that affects not just media performance, but the viability of entire go-to-market strategies. Brands fulfilling cross-border from the UK faced margin compression. Those importing every order had to rethink their fulfilment model. Some came under de minimis protection temporarily, only to lose it later.

For the first time, reliance on one market has had a pronounced impact across the business - operations, forecasting, and strategic planning, not just marketing efficiency.

"We're operating in an increasingly complex trade environment with new challenges emerging constantly - higher tariffs, increased protectionism, shifting geopolitical and economic dynamics. The barriers to global e-commerce are rising, not falling, which means agility isn't optional anymore; it's survival. The brands navigating this successfully have tools that let them pivot quickly. When one market becomes prohibitively expensive or risky, they can shift focus without rebuilding their entire operation. We're also seeing growing demand for B2B2C capabilities - brands need flexibility in how they operate across different markets. Managing the cost of returns is also critical yet often overlooked. Tax and duty drawback mechanisms can significantly impact profitability, especially in high-tariff environments. When you're dealing with volatile duties and complex regulations, these operational details become major levers for protecting margins. The brands thriving today are discovering efficiencies they didn't expect, precisely because they have systems that evolve alongside their business." - Max O'Brien, Sales Director, Global-e

US-based brands have faced similar challenges exporting. Where UK brands had one major variable to manage (getting into the US cost-effectively), US brands attempting to export had to navigate multiple markets implementing retaliatory tariffs simultaneously. The operational burden increased significantly.

What we're seeing brands do differently: Rather than concentrating on a single large market, brands are building diversified portfolios of export markets. The question has shifted from "where can we grow fastest?" to "how do we grow while managing concentration risk?"

For brands planning international expansion now, the first strategic question is about balance: which combination of markets gives us growth opportunity while reducing exposure to policy changes, cost shocks, or competitive pressure in any single region?

Rethinking year-one economics: market entry investment vs. acquisition cost

One of the most persistent assumptions about international expansion is that a new market should deliver profitable returns immediately. Brands switch on a market, watch the ROAS, and expect it to perform like their home market from week one. When it doesn't - and it rarely does in the first 6-12 months - the default response is to reduce spend or pause entirely, citing poor unit economics. This creates a cycle where international "doesn't work" because the initial investment was never structured to succeed.

The reality of market entry costs: Entering a new market involves upfront costs that look fundamentally different to performance marketing in an established market. You're not acquiring customers from existing demand - you're building awareness, sometimes for the brand, sometimes for the product category itself.

For less familiar categories, the task doubles: you need to establish why the product matters and why your brand is the right choice.

Evaluating that spend purely as acquisition cost makes year-one performance look poor, creates tension between growth and finance teams, and often leads to premature withdrawal from markets that needed more time to develop.

How to structure market entry investment: The brands managing this well separate their budgets into two distinct categories:

1. Market entry investment - the upfront cost of building awareness and establishing the brand
2. Ongoing acquisition - performance marketing once the market has baseline traction

This distinction changes how success is measured. Market entry investment isn't judged on immediate ROAS - it's judged on whether the conditions for sustainable acquisition are being created.

Signals that indicate progress in year one:

• Branded search volume increasing over time
• Engagement improving as creative becomes more culturally relevant
• Second purchase rates moving in the right direction
• Returns and support tickets remaining within manageable ranges
• Delivery times and landed costs not creating friction that erodes trust

If those signals are improving, you're building the foundation for a profitable market. If you're focused exclusively on week-one ROAS, you're likely to pull investment before the market has a chance to mature.

Europe as a strategic starting point: proof of concept, then localisation

For UK brands reconsidering the US as a default first choice, Europe has become a more attractive alternative - not as a single market, but as a portfolio.

Rather than concentrating all international investment in one market, brands are launching across multiple European markets simultaneously. Fulfilment typically runs from a hub in the Netherlands, allowing cost-effective distribution across the EU. The initial launch is often in English only, keeping operational and content complexity manageable while testing demand.

If there's an economic downturn or policy change in Germany, you still have six or seven other European markets contributing to performance. When you want to grow further, the natural next step is translating into German or French and deepening localisation in markets showing the strongest signals.

This inverts the traditional model, where translation and full localisation were prerequisites to launch. Here, translation becomes a second-phase investment, justified by data rather than assumption. You move from "we should translate" to "we can predict the uplift and justify the cost."

The operational foundation required: This strategy depends on having the right fulfilment infrastructure in place. A European hub that can ship efficiently across the EU isn't optional - it's the enabling condition. Without it, you're back to cross-border shipping with all the delays and cost unpredictability that creates.

For brands evaluating this approach, the key question is whether the operational groundwork can be established before scaling spend.

Market prioritisation: using evidence, not familiarity

Market selection has often been driven by a combination of intuition, familiarity, and surface-level attractiveness. A market looks large, culturally similar, or feels like a logical next step. This approach introduces risk that becomes harder to justify when international expansion requires meaningful capital investment.

How market prioritisation should work:

The brands we work with use a structured scorecard to evaluate and rank markets. The scorecard includes weighted factors based on what matters most for their specific business. Common factors include:

• Existing brand demand (search volume, social signals)
• GDP per capita and disposable income
• Internet penetration and eCommerce maturity
• Advertising costs relative to expected customer value
• Category-specific signals relevant to the product

Where nuance matters more than rankings: A scorecard gives you a defensible shortlist, but operational reality often reshapes the conclusion. Germany might rank highly while Austria and Switzerland don't - but if you're already translating into German and fulfilling to Germany, activating those adjacent markets is minimal incremental effort.

Similarly, Hong Kong can be operationally straightforward for US brands (US labelling accepted, efficient import processes) even though population size keeps it low in market-size rankings. The scorecard's purpose isn't to automate the decision - it's to ground it in evidence rather than familiarity, and to stop teams spending months on debates that feel data-driven but are actually based on comfort and assumption.

Operations as the growth lever: looking beyond marketing performance

Marketing teams often lead international expansion conversations because it feels like a growth and acquisition challenge. But in practice, operational constraints frequently cap growth before marketing performance does.

The operational levers that matter:

Several factors determine whether a market becomes profitable at scale, and most of them sit outside the marketing function:

• Local payment methods - offering the payment options customers in that market actually use, not just what your platform supports by default
• Foreign exchange costs - understanding how FX fees and conversion rates affect margin, and whether you're losing more than expected in the payment flow
• Store and traffic routing - how international visitors are directed and whether the site experience is optimised for their needs
• Returns experience - whether returns are straightforward, affordable, and meet local expectations
• Fulfilment speed - how your delivery promise compares to the local competition customers are used to

The last point is often the most significant. If you're entering Australia and the dominant department store offers next-day delivery with free returns, while you're shipping cross-border with two-week delivery and paid returns, you're not competing. You're operating at a structural disadvantage that no amount of media spend will overcome.

"As cross-border trade gets more complex – from rapidly shifting local payment preferences to FX volatility and new 'mini-peak' moments in every market – the best brands aren't doing 'accidental international', they're designing for it. They're diversifying into new markets deliberately, rethinking year-one economics country by country, and investing early in the payment and finance infrastructure that lets them operate like a local business everywhere before they scale." - George Bland, GTM Partnerships Manager, Airwallex

What an experience parity audit looks like:

Before scaling paid investment in a market, you need to assess whether the fundamentals are in place:

• Are you offering the payment methods people in this market expect?
• Are you losing margin in FX and fees without realising it?
• Is your delivery promise competitive against the obvious local alternatives?
• Are returns easy, predictable, and credible for customers?
• Are customers clear on what they'll pay, and when they'll pay it?

If you can't answer those questions confidently, scaling paid media is how you discover your operational weaknesses in public. The result is high acquisition cost, poor retention, and a market that looks unprofitable, not because the demand isn't there, but because the experience wasn't ready.

Building relevance before scale: community-first market entry

Most brands enter a new market by exporting their catalogue - existing product range, some translation if budget allows, slightly adapted creative, then spend. The assumption is that if the brand works in one market, it should work everywhere. But a French customer won't connect with a British brand for the same reasons a British customer does. The cultural triggers, the way the product fits into their life, the elements of the brand that resonate are all different.

What community-first market entry looks like:

Rather than pushing a catalogue into a market and hoping it fits, some brands are starting with relevance and building the brand on top. They identify local voices - influencers, thought leaders, community figures - who already have trust and credibility in that market, and work with them to introduce the brand in a way that feels authentic, not imported.

Early customers come in through recommendation and trust, not persuasion. The content is native because it's created with people who understand what works locally. One tactic we've seen work well is whitelisting: putting paid spend behind influencer content rather than the brand's own page. The message travels from the influencer, so the introduction feels like a recommendation, not an advertisement.

This approach takes more thought and more local partnership, but it creates something most international strategies lack: an authentic entry point. For categories where trust and cultural fit matter, this can be the difference between a market that struggles to gain traction and one that builds momentum quickly.

AI as accelerator: where it's actually useful

There is a version of the AI conversation where the technology "solves" internationalisation by automating everything. That's not what's happening in practice, and it's not what serious operators believe.

AI has removed a significant portion of the manual, repetitive work that used to slow down market research, localisation, and reporting. That's valuable, but it's not transformative on its own.

"AI applied at the operational layer lets brands scale internationally without scaling headcount, complexity, or operational risk." - Vidar Trojenborg, Co-Founder & CEO, Emfas

Where AI is creating leverage:

• Market research and competitive analysis - you can get a 95% accurate snapshot of which brands are competing in a category, how subcategories are growing, and what customer behaviour looks like in a market, in a fraction of the time it used to take
• Translation - you can turn on a German site overnight that is almost correct, then have one person review brand-critical copy for tone and accuracy. It's not perfect localisation, but it compresses timelines significantly
• Data analysis - many new data tools allow you to ask direct questions of your data (which markets are acquiring customers most profitably, which products are driving growth in specific regions) without manual reporting

The risk is treating these outputs as fact without validation. International has too many edge cases, too much local variation, and too many factors that change quickly for blind reliance on AI-generated insights.

"What we're seeing across fashion brands is a very pragmatic use of AI. The priority is to remove friction in workflows that slow teams down. Product copy localisation and translation stand out as one of the highest-impact use cases. Brands are using AI to publish localised products and content faster across markets, without adding headcount or compromising consistency." Rikard Candell, Chief Commercial Officer, Centra

How to use AI effectively:

Use it to get to 85% quickly - compress research cycles, identify patterns faster than manual analysis allows, test more markets in parallel. But apply judgment and validate the outputs; it's a speed tool, not a strategy tool. The brands using AI well are iterating on localisation more quickly than was previously possible, and that pace advantage compounds. In international expansion, getting to 85% right quickly, learning from real data, and adjusting is often more valuable than spending 12 months aiming for 100% certainty upfront.

Final thoughts: what to reassess before scaling international in 2026

"Cross-border ecommerce is racing toward an $8 trillion projection by 2030. The merchants building for it today will define the next era of retail; everyone else will be catching up." - Sam Atkinson, Co-founder & CEO, Swap Commerce

If you're planning to grow international revenue significantly over the next 12 to 36 months, these are the areas worth addressing before committing capital:

On market strategy:

• Audit your market concentration risk. Model scenarios where your primary export market contracts by 30% and evaluate whether your strategy remains viable.
• Build a structured market prioritisation scorecard using weighted factors specific to your business, not generic assumptions about market size or language.
• If you're evaluating Europe, map out which markets can be activated as a cluster with minimal incremental operational lift.

On financial planning: 

• Separate market entry investment from ongoing acquisition cost in your budgeting and reporting. Clarify internally what success looks like in year one versus year two.
  Set realistic expectations with leadership on year-one profitability. Secure agreement on the upfront investment required to build awareness before expecting mature-market performance.
  Model the cost of building awareness in markets with low existing brand recognition. Is the investment case clear, and do you have internal alignment on the payback period?

On operations:

• Conduct an experience parity audit before scaling spend. How does your delivery promise, returns policy, and payment options compare to what customers in your target markets expect from local competition?
• Confirm whether you have the fulfilment infrastructure in place to deliver competitively. If you're launching across Europe, is a regional hub established and operational?
• Review whether you're offering the payment methods customers actually use in each market, not just what your platform defaults to.

On localisation and relevance:

• Decide whether you're launching with translated content or building relevance first through local partnerships. Both approaches work, but the choice needs to be deliberate.
• Establish clear criteria for when you'll invest in full localisation. What evidence (traffic volume, conversion rates, customer feedback) will trigger translation investment?
• If you're using AI for translation or market research, build in validation steps. Where are the outputs strong, and where do they need human review?

On resilience

• Stress-test your strategy against realistic disruptions: tariff changes, economic downturns in one market, a competitor entering with superior fulfilment. Does your approach hold up, or are you overly exposed?
• Evaluate whether you have optionality. If one market underperforms, can others compensate? If costs increase unexpectedly, can you adjust without abandoning the strategy entirely?

Many of the themes explored here - from managing international risk and rethinking market entry economics, to building operational resilience and local relevance - will be unpacked in far more depth at the Pulse eCommerce Summit on the 13th and 14th May 2026. Across two days, we’ll bring together senior eCommerce leaders, operators and specialists to share real-world experiences, practical frameworks and honest lessons from scaling brands internationally in a far more complex global landscape. If international growth is on your roadmap for 2026 and beyond, register now to secure your place.