Three Business Ideas That Help With Doing Business Internationally

The first things to remember when doing business overseas are to have patience, conduct diligent research, and have someone on hand who understands the local context. Fortunately, in addition to patience and preparation, businesses of all sizes now have many online tools to help make it easier to do business in other countries. In fact, companies are using the Internet to offer better service to their business clients to help them ship overseas more conveniently, communicate using low-cost calling services, and easily send money across borders with lower fees.

International Calling Services

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The prices and product offers for global communications are cheaper and include more options than ever before. For large, established corporations or small start-ups, business owners can now choose from a range of phone services that meet their exact needs and budgets. Internet-based international calling plans offered by Lingo include unlimited calls to landlines in up to 90 countries and mobile phones in 55 countries. Skype also offers international calling packages that cost even less, though to a more limited number of countries.

Virtual Conference Calls

To facilitate meetings and lower the costs of doing international business, many online conference calling platforms offer a range of free and paid services to meet the needs of small businesses as well as big businesses. Popular conference calling platforms like join.me provide audio and video conference calling, screen sharing, mobile apps, and more for a limited number of people on free versions and up to 250 participants on its most complete paid package.

International Shipping

Shipping products overseas presents a number of obstacles, including higher shipping costs, having to pay import or export tariffs, and learning new shipping rules and trade laws for the countries you do business in. To help you do business overseas, UPS, FedEx, DHL, and the U.S. Postal Service all offer web-based tools to help you track shipments, estimate shipping and tariff costs, and check for legal compliance in the country you are doing business.

With UPS’s TradeAbility, you can estimate shipping costs, look up duty fees, and get information about trade restrictions, international forms, and other import/export regulations. Both DHL and FedEx offer businesses of all sizes specially catered international shipping services, and the USPS offers business owners free downloadable global shipping software to prepare to ship anywhere in the world.

Transferring Money Internationally

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The flow of money across borders has also become cheaper and more convenient for business owners to pay for goods and services, pay employees, or transfer money to international affiliates. If you’re doing business in countries like Mexico or India, the fees to send money to Mexico and India are lower than ever. You can send payments directly to bank accounts as well as to a person for pick-up and track the payment online.

The Internet has leveled the playing field for doing international business and paved the way for specially designed tools suited for businesses of different sizes to do international business. These web-based tools allow businesses to significantly lower the costs of doing business abroad as well as open up new opportunities to do business, hire international employees, and collaborate with other organizations all over the world.