Great news for Israeli eCommerce: PayPal users in Israel can now* manage their account completely in Hebrew.
They can also:
Check out from any site (worldwide) that supports PayPal in their native Hebrew
The language option may need be changed in the course of the transaction
Israeli merchants may default users to Hebrew, or allow the user’s default browser/account settings to select the language
For some time now, they can also pay in Shekels. This is especially important for local sellers that will surely want to add PayPal as a payment option, as it means that neither the buyer nor seller needs to pay currency exchange fees
Another feature that has been around for a while is that PayPal users with an Israeli account (meaning that the address they have registered in their PayPal profile is an Israeli one) can withdraw funds to an Israeli bank account without any fees (for withdrawals of 1000 ILS or more)
PayPal has been available in Hebrew for a while now via the PayPal iPhone App. Finally, eCommerce is coming to the phone in a real way.
It seems that the only major feature left for PayPal Israel to add is to allow buyers to fund transactions directly from their bank account (or to fund their PayPal account via their bank). No, I don’t have an inside scoop on when that will happen, but I also don’t believe it is in the best interest of users to have that feature, since most users like the added delay of having purchases appear in their bank balance. I know I do.
All in all, Israeli eCommerce sellers and even occasional users in Israel should be the greatest beneficiaries of the new PayPal language version. If you deal with Israeli merchants, adding PayPal to their site may be a nice way for them to boost sales, with very little new investment, but you may want to make sure the integration is done right. PayPal has great marketing (usually free) campaigns which promote merchants that have a good integration with their payment service. So, do it right, and contact your local office to make sure they know about your site, and hopefully invite you to join their next campaign.
*DISCLAIMER
As of press time, the Hebrew enabled portions of the PayPal site seem to be disabled. This page seems to be working best right now, in case you want to get an early peek. This may be a glitch in the early days of the launch, but since PayPal does not seem to have made any news about it themselves, we may have just seen the site launch before it is totally live. Stay tuned.
It almost seems like a setup. I have been itching to write about how international buyers are mistreated by so many US eCommerce sites, and then I went shopping for some telephone equipment and ended up having to jump through all knds of hoops in order to buy product.
I understand that there is a fear of fraud from international buyers, but rather than putting buyers through such a painful process, surely there must be a better way. Well, there used to be a much better way: FraudSciences. Yes, that is the startup that I used to work for, that was eventually bought by PayPal. Back in the days of FraudSciences, we helped sellers with international transactions. For some sellers, they had a policy that they simply never sold outside the US. Others had put in place a stringent set of rules for verifying the identity of a buyer overseas, or even in neighboring Canada.
The smartest of these sellers set a threshold over which they would manually verify transactions that posed undue risk. The less aggressive sellers simply closed their doors to anyone outside the US of A.
Now, I am not suggesting that sellers should take on undue risk just to enable me and my fellow ‘foreigners” to be able to partake in the great American passtime of shopping. What I am saying is that there is likely a lot of room for improvement in how sellers can find ways to enable selling cross border rather than just putting more and more senseless hurdles in the way for good buyers to be able to buy, from wherever they are.
Do you agree? Got any great verification tips for sellers that can help them enable more international sales without making international buyers use a local friend of family member as a drop-shipping warehouse?
Here are a few examples that come to mind:
When a buyer’s billing address and/or shipping address are a good match to their geolocation, then consider that this may be a good indication that you are dealing with the real card owner. To match the user’s IP address to the shipping or billing address, you may want to look at a company called Maxmind.
Another company that did something similar to what FraudSciences offered, was a company called PreCharge. Different in some ways, but essentially, they offered a guarantee to the seller that a verified transaction would be their responsibility. Thereby making it sellers more inclined to sell cross border.
Naturally, there is PayPal. There is lots of misinformation out there about PayPal and their ability to help you sell cross border, safely and effectively. With over 200 million accounts of which almost 100 million of them are active, you just can’t ignore the power of this payments machine. Moreover, their accounts are litterally all over the world. Have you tested them for cross border sales lately? If not, let me suggest that you test selling without requiring a local PayPal address. What a pain it is to jump through that hoop.
Just a few notes about the online radio broadcast from last week on Rusty Mike Radio.
Firstly here is the podcast of our segment from the show:
In the interview, Afternoon Schmooze host Nettie Feldman was mostly interested in offering some direction to new entrants into eCommerce on how to get started. To cover such a broad topic properly could easily have taken over Nettie’s full show that day, and only begin to scratch the surface.
As a result, I decided to give first time sellers something they could actually try in order to see if the experience gets them (you?) excited about the possibilities, or even just to test the acceptance of their product in the marketplace.
Established Marketplace vs. Dedicated Site
The very first question to ask yourself is:
How much time and money am I prepared to invest in my new venture (selling online for the first time)?
If you already know what kind of site you want to create, and have the time and budget to hire:
a web developer
web designer
SEO specialist
and you are ready to engage in various form of online marketing which will likely include a mix of
text based search ads
a targeted pay per click and display ads campaign as well as
all the work that is needed to get yourself noticed in the social media circles
then a dedicated site may be a good option for you to consider. Otherwise, a fully hosted and well established marketplace may be the right place for you to start. Following are a few marketplaces to consider, and few words about each.
The largest marketplace in terms of total sellers and buyers as well as total sales. Payments are easily integrated with PayPal as well as credit card and other payment options. You can target regional eBay sites too. Sell on ebay.fr or ebay.co.uk if you want to target these markets directly instead. eBay.com is viewed by a global user base in general, but less used by buyers in countries that have their own localized eBay site. At the bottom of the eBay.com home page is a link the list of 30 localized eBay sites. Not all are branded as “eBay,” but that could change over time.
The fastest growing marketplace and also has a huge amount of traffic. Amazon has their own payment platform integrated called Amazon Payments. Great tool for US based sellers, but Amazon Payments is still not available for international sellers, AFAIK. The site is a textbook in the study of Best Practices for all aspects of eCommerce, but my #1 pet peeve is still violated by the site: new users are forced to create an account before they can buy. Surely, with the amount of traffic they generate they must have a good reason for it, but I don’t believe that smaller sites should emulate this practice.
A great new startup from Israel that is globally focused on letting fashion designers and trendsetters from all over the world meet in a well designed eCommerce environment that includes social media and marketing tools. Once again, payment is integrated with PayPal so that a new seller can get started right away.
Also check AuctionBytes.com for their in depth report: Seller’s Choice: Merchants Rate Ecommerce Marketplaces, where Editor Ina Steiner and more than 1,400 sellers rate the various marketplaces on a wide range of attributes. Interesting findings indeed.
An eBay-style marketplace with the option to list items for auction and immediate sale. The site is targeted at the growing Anglo community in Israel, and has recently been given a complete facelift. The navigation is very similar to eBay and it has even integrated PayPal for local payment by credit cards and PayPal balance. I have not made a purchase on the site since it was revamped to test the integration, so I am interested to hear how the integration goes for anyone out there that has purchased on the site recently. Sellers can list for free, or pay to have their listing featured on the home page (20 NIS) and/or featured on the category page (2 NIS). To my knowledge, there are no fees on the buyer. Sellers can list in any of these four currencies: NIS, USD, EUR, GBP. Fact is that PayPal will allow the seller to collect in any of their 23 support currencies (see list here).
A site that makes it easy to list items in the classic format of a classified ad. There is no fee for listing a personal item with a single or no picture, and extra pictures are just 5 NIS. The site is also English and therefore only focused on the growing but smaller Anglo community in Israel. Fees do apply for companies listing items. For example: an auto dealer selling cars on the site can pay a monthly or per sale fee, whereas an individual can list their car for free.
The web’s answer to the way we used to list things in the local newspaper in the Classified Section. According to the Fact Sheet in the About section: craigslist is a “Local classifieds and forums – community moderated, and largely free” which is even better than it was in the newspaper. The site epitomizes the adage that less is more, being minimalistic to a tee. Hardly any graphics, besides the few images that users post for their items. For Israeli sellers, the site has three regions: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa. All in English.
Great site for person to person (P2P) selling, but also used extensively by companies to advertise first and second hand items for sale all over Israel. Besides the items for sale through Yad2 (literally translates as second-hand) itself, the site acts as an eCommerce portal. The iPhone App is a wonderful new addition too.
This is certainly not an exhaustive list, but for first time sellers in Israel, it represents a good few places to start. Just for fun, here are a few more local places to sell:
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