The hidden costs of global expansion (and how to finance them)

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Expanding a retail business globally has never been easier. If you’re selling on Amazon, good news: you have the potential to grow your business across the world.

This is one of our passions: we firmly believe that any successful seller on Amazon can use the platform to expand their brand internationally, fast, into any of Amazon’s 23 marketplaces.

Although, of course, fast expansion has risks and dangers, and one of the biggest considerations for brands is how to finance their growth. Without ready capital, a scalable global expansion strategy can fail quickly.

Enter CapEc. The business quickly provides growth capital specifically for eCommerce sellers, based on the seller’s store data.

Here’s how CapEc can help with the ‘hidden costs’ of global expansion.

Hidden cost 1: The long loan process

Securing capital to fund your inventory is traditionally a long process. It’s usual to face long wait times, credit hurdles and unexpected delays. Time is money: this process can slow down global expansion, decrease your business agility and cause you to miss opportunities. It’s a major headache for newer brands or those sellers trying to scale up internationally.

With funding from CapEc, it’s much simpler. CapEc provides up to 75% of your invoice value, paid directly to your suppliers within 48 hours. There is no credit check: funding is based on your real store performance data.

You connect your eCommerce store – Amazon, Shopify, Walmart – to the CapEc platform, and based on your sales data, it funds up to 75% of a purchase order. You get the decision within a couple of days, so you can move fast and stay agile.

Hidden cost 2: Credit checks

The traditional finance process also tends to penalise those businesses that haven’t been around a long time. If you’re a newer brand, without a decades-long credit file, it can be even harder to access funding for your business.

At CapEc, it’s your actual, relevant store data that counts, rather than your credit score. CapEc uses your Amazon sales, inventory and ad spend data to assess your eligibility, which means you can grow quickly from even the humblest beginnings.

Hidden cost 3: Inflexible repayments

Fixed monthly repayments on traditional funding can drain your budget, impacting your cash flow and actually making it harder to scale up and expand your business.

CapEc offers a repayment model that aligns payback with your actual revenue and syncs with your marketplace payouts, which gives you more flexibility when your sales volume is fluctuating. 

It means you can scale up, enter new markets and launch new products with less risk: the repayment will be required after your products get moving, not before.

Hidden cost 4: Warehousing fees

Warehousing fees can take up a huge chunk of your budget, especially when you’re expanding into multiple countries.

More agile sellers use funding to stagger their inventory deliveries, ensuring those fees are avoided and therefore their ROI is higher. They also have capital ready to replenish their bestsellers quickly, so they don’t take a hit from going out-of-stock.

Hidden cost 5: Event days

Event days, such as Prime Day and Black Friday, can be extremely profitable. But they can also be an enormous strain on your cash flow.

Increased order volumes, higher ad spend, front-loaded logistics costs and deep discounts, along with longer waiting times for returns and disbursements, add up to a big capital outlay with delayed payback.

To stay capital-ready through Q4 and other sales seasons, smart sellers can use CapEc to secure funding to invest in inventory and advertising without having to commit to an equity partner that ends up being more expensive.

e-Comas and CapEc are proud to work together to help brands grow quickly and globally on Amazon. If you want to scale faster, smarter and more profitably across international marketplaces, contact us today!