But with the Australian market reaching a saturation point, the biggest challenge for Sammy and her co-founder (and husband), Jason, became how to continue their growth. They decided to go international, expanding their store into Europe and North America. The markets took around 18 months with many hurdles to jump. For example: Finding couriers like ShipStation for U.S. orders and using Avalara for tax management across U.S.
States Setting up Stripe to handle international payments without additional fees and costs. Using BigCommerce to create dashboards for each country to manage and measure growth and sales in each location. But the results are astounding and prove that all Sammy and Jason’s hard work has definitely paid off as Neon Poodle’s revenue has grown by 232.14% since the international expansion.[*] TAKEAWAY: CAST A WIDER NET TO BOOST GROWTH When you first start out,
it’s great to produce and sell products for a super-targeted niche group of customers. This is exactly how Sammy started Neon Poodle… by selling custom neon signs to people in Australia. But when you’re ready, one of the best ways achieve growth is to expand your market. One of the best examples of this is Facebook. It started out as a network purely for college students, but when it had saturated that market, it opened up to all users. Another example of expanding your market comes from our very own Chief Sumo.