Equestrian Stockholm is a favorite among riders across the world for premium equestrian sportswear that combines fashion with functionality. The Swedish brand was selling online to global customers across Europe and the USA.
Realizing its growth potential, the brand was looking to accelerate its D2C global e-commerce business and grow sales in its key international markets as well as additional markets worldwide.
“Facing the many complexities involved in international trading, we realized that to capitalize on our global potential and expand in an efficient way we needed a comprehensive solution that would help us overcome the challenges we were facing and pave the way to achieving sustained growth,” explains Harald von Sydow, CTO and Head of Business Development at Equestrian Stockholm.
The online shopping experience the brand offered was only partially localized. Its webstore supported USD, EUR, and GBP, but shoppers in many international markets were not able to browse and pay in their local currency, exposing them to unknown currency conversion rates and international transaction fees. Additionally, customers were not presented with a calculation of the taxes and duties due on their orders at checkout, often facing unexpected fees upon delivery as a result.
The Equestrian Stockholm team realized that to increase international conversion rates and grow sales, they needed to enhance the online buying journey for their global shoppers and decided to partner with Global-e: “With Global-e we can now offer customers in over 200 destinations worldwide a seamless end-to-end shopping experience, tailored to their local market,” explains von Sydow, “Global-e’s Shopify Native solution has enabled us to deploy advanced localization across all markets, through a single integration process.”
Equestrian Stockholm can now display product pricing in local currencies, set per market and in line with the brand’s business strategies. The brand is now able to provide customers with a guaranteed final cost of their purchase, including all taxes and duties. Global-e’s advanced tax and duty solution enables the brand to set the optimal solution per market, based on local best practices, including prices inclusive of all taxes and duties, prices inclusive of duties with taxes displayed and pre-paid at checkout, or calculation of all taxes and duties displayed at checkout with a prepayment option. For example, in Canada pricing is inclusive of duties and local sales tax is displayed at checkout.
“The ability to offer a truly localized experience has been transformative for our brand. For example, we can now present taxes and duties in a way that meets local customer expectations. Our global customers now enjoy a premium shopping experience that matches the quality of our products, leading to an increase in conversion rates and sales and higher customer satisfaction,” Says von Sydow.
Operational Excellence Worldwide
Managing multiple complex aspects of global e-commerce operations presented the brand with numerous challenges. These included handling compliance with local regulations, tax and duty management and international payment processing and fraud prevention.
“Before partnering with Global-e, navigating the constantly changing regulatory landscape across different global markets was a major challenge and a very tedious and time-consuming task for our team,” says von Sydow.
As Merchant of Record, Global-e covers all aspects of international trade compliance, managing collection, remittance and filing for sales and ensuring continuous compliance with changes to international regulations. “This comprehensive approach has dramatically reduced the complexity of compliance management and the operational challenges we previously faced,” notes von Sydow. For example, U.S. sales tax compliance across different states previously added significant strain to the brand’s internal resources. Von Sydow says “With Global-e as the Merchant of Record, we no longer need to worry about this. They do the heavy lifting for us, so our teams can focus on the brand and product.”
In addition, Global-e’s advanced international payment management solution, which includes local acquiring and automatic rerouting across multiple payment providers, has improved payment acceptance rates significantly, reaching over 99% payment approval rates across international markets.
