subject: The Web Has Blurred The Boundaries For International Commerce [print this page] The world is a much smaller, more connected place these days, a phenomenon which has raised the expectations placed on all kinds of businesses.
Firms of all kinds be they a retailer, wholesaler or manufacturer - used to be happy to simply operate from their premises and offer their services within a set geographical area, based on the degree to which they could rely on their own resources, or those of the delivery agent whom they used, to ensure that deliveries were carried out reliably, and arrived approximately when customers were expecting them.
A massive change has been wrought on this thinking, though, by the arrival of the internet. If someone cannot find an item they are looking for from a local source, they are quite happy to go online and see who else can meet their need. And in this context, the customer is unlikely to care about where the business which has what they are looking for in stock is based they are much more likely to simply be happy that they can get their hands on the goods.
Internet searches can be set to return results containing only entries from the country in which the search has been carried out. But also, it's possible to search the entire web and many people aren't even conscious of which of these options they are using when they search for something in particular.
It will only be when they arrive on the potential supplier's website that they are likely to notice that it might not be one based in their own country. And even then, the boundaries are being increasingly blurred by companies which, rather than using a country-specific domain, such as .co.uk, for their website, choose instead to use any of the plethora of non-specific ones - .com being the most obvious and widely-used example.
Then the issue arises of whether the customer considers having to have goods delivered from another country to be a factor in their buying decision. Of course, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the answer to this question will be 'no'.
The onus therefore lies with the seller to either make it clear that they can only offer deliveries to certain territories, or to find a suitable courier service with international coverage, which can fulfil their orders. Thankfully, the internet again means that this is usually a straightforward matter.
