International Marketplaces in 2022⎜ YLT Translations ⎜ EP 185

Ryan Cramer: What's up, everyone? Welcome to my corner of the internet. I'm your host, Ryan Cramer, and this is Crossover Commerce, presented by PingPong Payments, the leading global payments provider, helping sellers keep more of their hard- earned money. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Crossover Commerce. I'm your host, Ryan Cramer, and this is my corner of the internet where I bring the best and brightest Amazon and eCommerce experts in the industry to your earbuds or wherever you might be watching or listening from. We're going to bring actual insights and some thoughts and conversations to you with different topics. That conversation can be anything from logistics and sourcing to advertising and marketing to international expansion. This podcast ranges all over the place. But that being said, just want to give a quick shout out to our presenting sponsors, PingPong Payments. PingPong has been helping international sellers keep more of their hard- earned money by sending and receiving international payments in the localized currency. What does that mean? That means that you no longer have to pay fees to Amazon or any other marketplace that are set in stone by those entities. You can now have more access on what you're receiving in those transaction funds and keeping more of your hard- earned money. Everyone wants to put money towards actionable things like your inventory or buying more goods or being able to afford more employees or just paying out your VAs or pay yourself something. You can do that. And PingPong is one of those ways to help save more time, money, and effort. So go ahead at usa. pingpongx. com/ podcast and you'll be able to check out all of our past episodes, but also sign up for a free account today. That being said, again, this is episode 185. We're cruising right along, trying to get on pace for 200 by the end of 2021 so bear with me. We're going to have a lot of content coming your way here in the next couple days. If you're watching this live, you know that you can comment on the social media comment sections whether it's on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. Let us know where you're listening from or if you want to just say hi to myself or our guest, you can do that there. If you're listening to us, you can just comment in these show notes below. That being said, this year's been kind of crazy. I know this week is Thanksgiving. Traditionally, yesterday is I want to say the third largest shopping holiday in a typical year, right? Largest shopping day, I should say, of the year because people are thinking about Thanksgiving which means Black Friday, which means people are freaking about Christmas. It trickles on itself. So it's been a busy weekend for lots of eCommerce sellers, retailers. You might have seen a lot of ads drop, lot of different things happening. But as any entrepreneur goes, it's nice to be present now, but looking to the future, you want to start planning for the next year and a lot of people, if you're smart enough, looking at that 2022 schedule saying, " That's not far away. What are our goals and visions for the next upcoming year?" And that's what we're going to talk about today with our friend of the podcast. She hasn't been on for a while I think actually since episode 100. But she's been doing lots of amazing things in the time since we last talked. Jana from YLT Translations is hopping back on Crossover Commerce and we're going to be talking about international marketplaces and what to expect in 2022. So with that being said, let's go ahead and bring her on back to Crossover Commerce. Without further ado, fresh off from being inaudible Jana from YLT. Jana, what's up? How are you?

Jana Krekic: inaudible. It's always good to be back on your show. I've been good. I've been busy. Honestly, Q4 has been less busy than last year, which is not so puzzling why. But yeah, definitely things are going good and I'm looking forward to Christmas holidays and just taking some time off and getting ready for 2022 and what we discussed is going to be very exciting and most amazing year I'm sure.

Ryan Cramer: Yeah. It's busy. First and foremost, again, congratulations on the marriage and you guys are running two separate businesses, been actually touring around... I say, touring around, you're not a band. But you guys are traveling around quite a bit in terms of conferences and businesses. What's that been like since we last talked of? You had favorite conference or some awesome takeaways that have changed your business or mindset or anything like that since we last touched base?

Jana Krekic: Right. Well, last year has been very interesting for us because even though we are based in Europe, we could travel to the States unlike most of other Europeans. And so I was really, really, really blessed to have that opportunity and it was one of the first times in my life when I was actually grateful to have a Serbian passport because for the past 20, 25 years, we would have to have visas wherever we traveled and now, the tables have turned and we could travel to the States. So basically, last year was mostly in the States. Everything related to business happening inaudible States, we were there. That was very awesome. I grew close with so many people and we went to so many different events and definitely the highlight of my last year when it comes to speaking gigs and just showing myself in the business and appearances was definitely the Prosper Show. Ever since I started this business almost three years ago, I've had this goal in mind to speak at Prosper inaudible just like what Danny McMillan says. It's like going to the Oscars. This is like what Prosper is and that's what it was for me. So I was very honored to be invited to speak on stage there and definitely, Prosper was very intense. It was very action packed event especially because of the after parties and old aggregators just trying to outdo... Every single night was something better-

Ryan Cramer: You said yes a lot, right?

Jana Krekic: Yes. More unique, better, who's going to throw more money at the party and stuff like that. So definitely, it came with additional... It leveled up a lot, to say the least, that this was not... Amazon events were not like this two years ago. So definitely people up their game when it comes to that especially because when it comes to content and stuff like that and I was just super happy I could actually network and see real people and hang out with people in group and enjoy myself, have drinks because back home in Europe, everything was basically locked. So I was really happy about that. And just being part of the U. S. scene is much different than what the scene is like in Europe. And also you have access to much more people and it was definitely super rewarding experience. One of the best things was that I definitely could get closer with a lot of people from the industry that I now call really good friends and best friends. I'm just really happy about that because I think we have a really great community and people help each other. They're super nice and I'm just really happy that I'm actually part of it. Three years ago, I could not even imagine that something like that would be possible like going to this... Now in London, we're going to all these Christmas parties I'm invited to. So it's just good time to be an entrepreneur.

Ryan Cramer: Absolutely. I was going to say entrepreneurship seems like it's really become the forefront, especially online business, services, things like that. It's more important than ever and... Yeah, talked about this in the past, a couple episodes, is a lot of people have been inaudible just feel like 2021 has been a whiplash, right? Constant changes, little tweaks here and there. It's almost like death by a thousand paper cuts of... There's another change. What does that mean for people? There was... I believe you remember on Friday, it was the official update or announcement that TOS was going to change for launching products and different things like that where a lot of people speculated and it's going to happen the day after Christmas or after Thanksgiving which is again, very strange timing of what they're going to do.

Jana Krekic: Yes, very weird timing. And it's interesting that they decided to update TOS right now after not having it updated forever and that they haven't made these big changes in the... I just read today that people are still wondering what's happening with Super URLs because previously there was an information about an Amazon employee on a form basically saying all these things about rebate keys, search, buy, and find, everything that manipulates ranking and Super URLs... So Super URLs, that's something that I've mentioned for the first time ever. They were never banned or there were no talk about Super URLs and then this new updated TOS doesn't mention anything about Super URLs. So I'm just wondering because the TOS, of course, it's open for interpretation and it doesn't necessarily mean that this is what it looks like. Well, maybe if we put it this way, but then people are also going to try to find the way behind or just to surpass some things. But definitely big what they're saying about the search, find, buy because literally I think every Amazon seller has been doing it this or that way also affecting service providers who offer the service. I think it's really good that Amazon wants to fix this and stops manipulation of any kind. So I think that's actually good that they're doing good things for sellers. I just see and inaudible a future that Amazon is going to ban everything like the third party is doing so that sellers could only use Amazon stuff such as like how they launched that growth opportunity. What's it called? Not the growth. I always forget the name. Yeah, the tool that Amazon launched for product research versus human crosstalk-

Ryan Cramer: Oh, right. The Opportunity Finder.

Jana Krekic: Opportunity Finder. They called it like opportunity growth or something like that. That's their tool-

Ryan Cramer: Something like that.

Jana Krekic: ...and they launched it and that's something that, for instance, Helium 10 offers as well. So I'm just curious to see what else is going to be enrolled from Amazon in the future and how far they're going to take all these rules and if they're going to update TOS anytime soon again. And it's very interesting to see what's going to happen.

Ryan Cramer: Absolutely. So your initial take is just wait and see how this is going to affect... Because I think something like this actually has wider ranging effects for lots of different service providers, but also sellers too because if you're launching new products, you're trying to just put more product in market. It creates a fog or a barrier of what is the appropriate way to now launch new products and get exposure on Amazon. Is it only through... Again, a lot of people are leaning on now micro influencers or influencers in general or ads through TikTok or through different ways of driving traffic to your listings and having the outside source. So again, not really a clear picture of what Amazon's trying to present to sellers as this is the opportunity for you as a seller to now be effectively launching and getting exposure on Amazon.

Jana Krekic: What's really interesting when you mentioned TikTok and since we're going to talk about 2022, what's going to be really big and I really think it's going to be completely game changing is shopping inside of TikTok, like a TikTok store, not like an Instagram. It's not actually like an Instagram store like you can buy and scroll and stuff like that. But TikTok is going to have a special platform for that. I think that shopping inside of TikTok is going to be major also because when it comes to TikTok, it's a common misconception that only kids use TikTok and actually, 65% of the audience are females. This is information directly from the source, from the TikTok. So 65% of the platforms, users are females in their age from 18 to 30. So if you're having beauty products or anything, it's your target group, you should definitely go on TikTok and just going to do it. And a lot of people don't even know how it works. There are tons of ads. You don't have to only use influencers and create attention grabbing videos and stuff like that. Of course, you can do that, but there are tons of ads and different opportunities how you can get to reach your audience. And what's very interesting for TikTok is that they have a unique audience, which means that the audience that's on TikTok is nowhere to be found. They're not on Facebook, they're not on Instagram, they aren't anywhere. They're only on TikTok and they want to spend money. According to their research, the shopping spree of a random TikToker and their financial power and shows that they will spend more money than an average Facebook or Instagram users. So that's something crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: It's driving significant trends too for not just Amazon sellers but just for crosstalk.

Jana Krekic: Oh, yeah, from the keyword. Yeah, exactly. If you check the keywords in brand analytics, they will be influenced by what's trending on TikTok. I remember there was... I know a lot of people wrote about that, but I also was looking for something. It's like you take your pants or something and then you cut it somehow so you make it into a bra or something like that. It's cool when you're sleeping, whatever, I don't even want to get into that. But I remember seeing that in brand analytics as being a top search term of that sort of thing that's now being sold on Amazon which you can make yourself. It's not available to be sold on Amazon and that kind of influences this. So basically, TikTok trends and whatever they're doing, it's actually influencing the whole eCommerce space which is absolutely insane.

Ryan Cramer: That's a thing. It's going into 2022. I feel like when we were going through what we learned this past year, you have to sit down and go month by month of all the different things that changed in terms of marketing, in terms of outside traffic and what you can do, what you can't do, and what that future looks like. I think it's just painting a whole new, not difficult, but almost... Amazon's trying to cut down some of these... If you're a big inaudible fan, it's cutting off these external... Going off this one major path of not wanting these branches to occur and now they're trying to cut down on and have this mainstream of, " Can you be consistent? Let the product hopefully be featured." But again, competing with big time brands, lot people with lots of money, that competition of how do you stand out, there's been lots of great theories and what the future can look like and that's just really hard for a small to medium-sized business owner saying, " How can I stand out if I don't have the money?" Just know how to do it now appropriately. So all these different things or tools that essentially are there and they're still okay by Amazon and driving outside traffic... It's very tough to know as a small, medium- sized business owner of you hear one thing and then it changes the next month and then you have to sit down and refigure out your whole entire plan. Is that what some of your customers are telling you too? It's hard to understand of, do I expand to these markets or do I stay inaudible amazon. com? Or what are those conversations for you saying, " Hey, it's so difficult to understand a whole new language, let alone all the new rules and resources that I have to understand. I'm just going to stick with. com and be okay with that?"

Jana Krekic: Well, you know what? Dot com, it has become a fearless jungle for a lot of sellers where not a lot of them can survive. They got eaten by other animals, honestly, and it's been a really big jungle with tons of rules actually. So a lot of people just think, " Well, I don't think I can fight anymore. I'm just going to go back and just maybe rethink my resources, just do something else." And then that's when they decide to expand because they're like, " Well, maybe I could get more sales in a different marketplace with still my best selling product and I don't have to be afraid of so many different rules and things that will change overnight," and stuff like that. When it comes to Germany or maybe some other European marketplaces, they do not enforce the rules so quickly and they don't change them so fast as they do for the U. S. Amazon versus the latest, what happened is that Amazon will stop taking U. K. visas like credit card Visas from Amazon sellers and others, you cannot use it for business anymore, and that sucks a lot. So you can still crosstalk-

Ryan Cramer: I believe Visa's, yeah, the number one card carrier in the world.

Jana Krekic: Yes. You can still use a debit Visa card, but you cannot use the credit card and that's because... I just read about it today because it was like, " Why did they just going to do it? Why do they want to screw the whole English population? What's this like? Something personal?"

Ryan Cramer: crosstalk.

Jana Krekic: ...U.K. And then basically what happens is because U. K. is no longer part of Europe, so post Brexit, since they're not European Union anymore, the fees for Visa have gone up like crazy high and Amazon decided they don't want to do anything without crazy big fees and then they're like, " Your cards are canceled, but you can still use the Visa debits and MasterCard." But the majority of the population, I think everywhere in the world uses credit cards like Visas and MasterCards. So I'm really curious to see like, " Is this going to affect MasterCard as well? What's going to happen?" Maybe the U. K. will end up with just users having to use the debit cards instead of all the credit cards. That's a major, major deal for the beginning of 2022 as well. So I think that's going to be a little bit uncomfortable for a lot of people.

Ryan Cramer: The last time Amazon did this too it was a squeeze. Ultimately, it's to get their fees down. Amazon has a paper transaction. And that makes sense, right?

Jana Krekic: Absolutely.

Ryan Cramer: Any small to medium- sized business owner, that's why you say you have to have a minimum threshold of spend in order for it to make financial sense. Same with Amazon. They have to still pay the processing fees just like everyone else. It's great because they do so much business that those fees, they add up quickly. So like you said, if it's higher in U. K. versus the rest of European Union, I'm assuming that Amazon just let in a number of inaudible said, " This is what we pay everywhere else. This is what we're going to pay here and we won't accept it any otherwise." And probably Visa within the next, I'm assuming this next week if they can't accept Amazon right now, shoppers can't use Visa on one of the more popular marketplaces, if not the most popular marketplace in the U. K. during Black Friday and-

Jana Krekic: Exactly.

Ryan Cramer: ...inaudible and all those different things. So again, the squeeze is on of negotiate those rates a lot better. Amazon's probably going to win in the next day or two and then we'll be back to score one. So again, it's the power of do you want to go away from this very big money printing machine or do you find a supplemental area and if there's ways to do that, I know lots of people are looking at marketplaces of, " Hey, if I get shut down in the U. S. for one reason or another, my listing gets suspended. I have inventory issues. I can still rely on amazon. de or Amazon UK or different marketplaces in general.

Jana Krekic: Right, and we-

Ryan Cramer: There's a lot of different opportunities.

Jana Krekic: Yeah. And we've seen, of course, a decrease in the U. K. sellers who want to expand to Europe and let's say, sellers from Germany or from the U. S., most of them would go to Europe now, not necessarily U. K. as well. Earlier, U. K. was mandatory especially for the U. S. sellers because of the language and of course, everything. But now there's been a certain decrease in the numbers of those who want to do that which is absolutely justified because the inventory problems have absolutely... Everything going on. Yeah, I'm really curious to see in 2022 what's going to happen. And when it comes to new Amazon marketplaces, talking about like Sweden, Poland, and a lot of sellers want to go to Turkey now as well. Sweden, Poland, we haven't still seen any amazing sales. Sellers are getting some traction, there's some certain sales, but those marketplaces haven't reached their potential yet. So if you expect sales and if you expect to, I don't know, triple your revenue, they're going to Poland, which is an amazing marketplace, I would not get my hopes up right now. And also what happened with the Amazon Netherlands. For the whole first year, Amazon hasn't rolled out PPC for them. So as soon as they have rolled it a year later, they have surpassed bol. com which was the dominant marketplace in the country and then, people start getting some sales. But I feel that a lot of people, a lot of sellers were disappointed and then now they're like, "Hmm, I don't know if I want to do this marketplace or not." But when it comes to Sweden and Poland, I'm really curious to see what happens next year because I think that, for instance, like Poland, which also has a perfect position to sell to other countries also like in Europe because other countries that don't have their own Amazon like Norway or...

Ryan Cramer: Denmark.

Jana Krekic: Denmark, or yeah, like Scandinavian countries, Finland, and tons of other countries in Europe, especially the ones that are not in EU, they are going to be redirected and they're going to buy from Germany or from Poland and from elsewhere, and Poland has the central locations in Europe. And for many years, even before Amazon, Poland has been a really interesting location for big brands to have their warehouses over there because of the logistics and Poland has 12, 000 online stores. Allegro is top 10 marketplaces right after Tmall and Shopee which are top 10 marketplaces in the world. I foresee a really, really great future for Poland. Definitely. Especially when you see Zalando, also top marketplaces in Europe, they also expanded to Poland and Sweden last year. So there's got to be something that's really interesting with those countries so I will definitely keep an eye on Poland and Sweden. I think big things are coming for them. I know DSP has become available for Sweden as well. I just think that next year is going to be awesome and I think that more marketplaces will be enrolled next year. I'm really interested to see what's going to happen with South America, the marketplaces over there. I think that could be absolutely huge. So I'm not sure if that's going to happen next year and I've heard that things might start moving on that side of the map. So that would be really interesting, but I would definitely, definitely keep in mind on expansion that way if you want to stay on Amazon. If not, I've heard that Walmart has been doing even better than Amazon for this beginning of Q4, that they have some insane... I think they doubled or maybe even tripled their revenue when it comes to marketplace and people who sell in Walmart. So I think Walmart is very, very trending. I know Tim Jordan has been talking about that a lot. So yeah, I think definitely expanding elsewhere will be very dominant in 2022 as well because ever since COVID, it literally skyrocketed. And we've been working with a lot of brands like, I don't know, Sephora, CVS. They haven't ever thought of selling online, but after COVID and everything, they had to put it all in in their online presence and they decided to go to other international marketplaces, which I think it's absolutely amazing. And what I would also suggest people to do is just go to brand analytics and see what people are looking for in these marketplaces because, for instance, in Germany, you have portable AC which is maybe if you check brand analytics, it's 1, 000 something frequency search term, but in Germany it's top 10 because there are no built- in ACs in Germany because it was never this warm as it was earlier. So people are really struggling to cool off during summer and they really want that portable AC that you're maybe not selling that well in the U. S. because people don't need it. But in Germany, this could be potentially a hot, hot product. So what I would do is I would definitely go to brand analytics and check the first 50 or 60 search terms and be like, "Hmm, okay, interesting." And then you could compare the competitors and everything. You can go to Buy Box and Helium 10 or Cerebro, whatever you want to do, and with a little research, you can see if you have a good potential for a marketplace. Maybe you're struggling in the U.S., but maybe it'll be dominant in Europe and some other marketplace or maybe Japan or UAE or Mexico. There're so many different options for you. But whatever you do, I would always suggest having a business plan. And when is the right time to expand? Well, not if you have one product and you're just going to start it. So you want to dip your feet in another country. Don't do it like that. We usually work with seven figure sellers and up who are already established and maybe who really did everything they could and now they want to expand elsewhere and to see if they can do better. Or just super successful brands that are just amazing and they just want to do amazing on other marketplaces as well. So I strongly suggest that you try to see how well your product will be doing on another marketplace, the PPC costs and everything. You can do that by yourself. Your VA can do it as well. It's not like you have to, I don't know, do what and it's not overly complicated. So I would definitely suggest 2022 as being also very trending in international marketplaces. Our business has also skyrocketed since the last year and a half which just shows how many people want to expand to other places and see potential in that. The only problem could be, of course, with inventory and the shipping. But what I've noticed that sellers now do is when you have the inventory in the U. K., you want to ship it to Europe, let's say you want to ship it to Germany because that's the biggest marketplace and everybody wants to be there. You just ship your goods not to Germany directly, but you ship it through Netherlands and it takes about two weeks for the products to reach your warehouse in Germany and you don't have to have different entity or inaudible whatever for Dutch. It's just literally traveling like this. That's a small hype that sellers are using that seems to be working still.

Ryan Cramer: Well, you brought up a good point that when people ask me, when's the right time to move international and I like the notion that says, it's up to you. It depends on how comfortable you feel. There's not a metric or there's not a point which you've reached as a seller. I'm assuming that is what you tell people is it depends on when you feel comfortable selling on multiple marketplaces that's when the right time is to do it, whether it be time, money, effort, having the right partners in place like you guys were clearly translations, PingPong for obviously accepting international payments, things like that where it makes complete sense and figuring out logistics I think that's the biggest caveat of can you get enough inventory to these locations. But again, it doesn't have to be a one to one ratio. It could be 10% of your inventory that you have in the United States or different marketplace. Or it could be 20% really just the dipping of the water-

Jana Krekic: There are no rules, but I would say that rule of thumb is that, of course, I agree whenever you're ready, but if you're a new seller or if you maybe selling this one product and then you're... Usually, if you have one product or maybe two products, don't go internationally. I don't think it's worth it because if you are not doing a lot of numbers on these two products, I wouldn't suggest that as being a good idea to scale at that point and go abroad, honestly, because I don't think you'll have enough of the revenue and everything and it's a long process like VAT numbers takes forever and you just really need to have the logistics and everything to take care of all of that.

Ryan Cramer: Right. You need to feel comfortable and make sure that you're profitable and you're doing well in house with your initial marketplace and then go from there.

Jana Krekic: Yeah, exactly.

Ryan Cramer: Very cool. You were talking about your growth in the past year and a half, too. I'm curious for your insights, is that growth from sellers outside the United States selling into the United States or is that in the United States as amazon. com and they're moving outward? Where do you see the most that people are asking for help at?

Jana Krekic: Yeah, definitely U. S. sellers who want to expand to other marketplaces and that's to Europe. So most work is Europe related like top four, five, six, or even all seven European marketplaces. And then it's Mexico and Canada. That's how it goes for the sellers. A lot of sellers that want to sell in Mexico, they don't contact us. They're just going to do it themselves so that's why I think that it's not in top three-

Ryan Cramer: Right, for you guys, yeah.

Jana Krekic: Yeah. But when it comes to other marketplaces, definitely Europe is still number one when it comes to U.S. seller who wants to expand to international marketplaces. U. K., Germany and France are still top three marketplaces that people expand to. I cannot just help but wonder why are still people doing so much of the machine translation and stuff like that because if your content is worthy to you in English. If you're like, " Wow, I have to have good content because I can sell my product." Why don't you have the same relationship with content in other languages? Because those content in other languages should be equally important to you as it is like on the U. S. marketplace because people will read it and it should make sense and it should have keywords, but they don't think that way. So it really makes me upset every time. I'm like, " But it's still content. It's just in different languages." You really have to perfect it and it has to be done good because you don't want to have a copy that doesn't make much sense to people who sell it. And people in Europe, not everyone speaks English. I know this is mind blowing for a lot of English speaking population. But in Europe, every second or third person, they don't speak English and those who speak, they're not super proficient at it. When they buy products, if they don't understand this fully, especially when it's beauty product, supplements, anything for babies, something that has weird ingredients, or something that you don't understand, you are highly unlikely going to buy it. And by leaving the content as it is just, left in English or some Chinglish version of it in French or Italian or Dutch, you are skipping every third customer. You're not targeting the whole marketplace and you're using a lot. People like to see that when it's written in their own language. You can see tons of regarding that. Harvard Business Review also said that you've been targeting every other person in this world if you are using only English as your advertising language of your product.

Ryan Cramer: I was going to say. There's two things that I thought between that of I'm assuming if I'm not a native English speaker or native speaker of that language, that there is a significant lift or drop off, I should say, if I'm person speaking French and I know that they clearly aren't speaking French or they're using machine learning or whatever, they can tell that that's not really a translation and you can see the discrepancies in it and there's probably a big drop off in those kinds of sales versus it's appropriately translated whether it be vernacular or any cadences and whatnot. Is that what you're talking about in terms of a significant lift like 20% drop off in sales because of that and there has that big of a bump?

Jana Krekic: Yeah, Exactly. And a lot of people, sellers, they come to us and they're like, " Can you check the listings? Can you just tell me what's good, what's not?" I'm surprised by how many of them... They're saying, " Oh, we don't have any sales. This is really not working out for us. I don't know what's wrong." And then you check the listing and it's Google Translate and you're like, " Well, of course it's not getting any sales or clicks or whatever because those listings don't make sense." And they're like, "Oh, really?" And they're like, " But we use professional machine service." And they're like, " Wow." I don't know. It doesn't make sense, right?

Ryan Cramer: That's incorrect.

Jana Krekic: Yeah. It's incorrect that people are not seeing sales. Or sometimes, they're seeing sales, but that could be so much better because even if you don't use a regular translation, word by word, like translation agency, they're not going to give you keywords. Sometimes, maybe it happens that just by doing that translation, it happens to be a keyword and you're like, " Whoa, I have a keyword here," but that's by pure accident not because somebody sat down and did the keyword research. So definitely, that's something that will increase your potential sales. Usually, what we see after the translation is done localized and done keywords, we see anything between 20 to 25% instant increase in your sales and stuff. I got some tons of really good case studies. But it's a no brainer. If you put something that people understand and if you put keywords that trigger the product when people type in that, why wouldn't you get sales, right? And that's just probably the only right way to do it, to just get someone who will do the keyword research and to do a decent text and that's it. It doesn't have to be all, I don't know, amazingly done, but if you want to get it done right just get it with the keywords because keywords are going to sell your product.

Ryan Cramer: Absolutely. My second question when I was thinking about some of the topics you were covering prior is how much of a lift is there or what kind of translation is there in the images you used. Is that something that you guys have looked into in terms of not just the language that you're using but in terms of the localized images that people are using whether it comes to lifestyle imagery or putting it in your A+ content? Does that matter too to an extent of who you're using to represent your product and where you're selling that product? Have you seen anything like that or done any research along those lines?

Jana Krekic: Yeah. We don't do any-

Ryan Cramer: I know you don't do imagery, but crosstalk.

Jana Krekic: Yeah, we don't do imagery and stuff like that. But sometimes, maybe for instance, if you want to sell this product in Norway, for instance, I don't know, you would maybe want to show people in winter jackets and something that's going to be relatable to these people. Maybe you don't want to show that they're in a desert or something, I don't know. You want to have a little bit more adjusting images and people ask for this. They're like, " Would this image work? What's wrong with this image?" Sometimes, there are also maybe sensitive topics that you will have to avoid. I would say that people would want to localize that images, but I haven't seen... Maybe 1% of sellers that are actually localizing them according to the language and the target audience, the company, they sell the products that they don't even just... The packaging is pretty much the same. You just have that inaudible five languages on the packaging. But the thing is that you... When it comes to main images, you can't localize. You still have to have one main image for each and every country, unfortunately, but there is a way how you can actually have different, let's say, text on images or even different images on different countries and that is for now only... In Vendor Central, this is possible, but in Seller Central, you have to apply for it's called a 360 marketplace, it's an Amazon program, and it costs 1500 euros plus 0. 8 or 1. 5% of your revenue. So it does cost a lot of money, but this gives you the opportunity to change the main images to have them customized both if you want different lifestyle images or if you want different text in different languages written on the main image, but that's it, that's the only way how you can do it. Apart from that, you can always play around with A+ and you can have completely different A + content and stuff like that. But from what I've seen also from very successful sellers, they haven't customized their images to different countries. Some of them ask like, " Would this be okay?" And then for instance, I have a big team of 82 people and then I just go to my German team and I'm like, " So what do you think about this? Would this work or not?" Because that's vox populi. That's exactly what you need. Those that are all native Germans. Or for instance, we had one product that one seller was selling. It was a t- shirt and it was like Mr. and Mrs. T- shirt with shady smiley drawn on it. And he was like, " We redid the whole thing." Their listing was fine. They were doing everything right and they're like, " But this product is just not selling." If he was a U. S. seller that expanded to Germany and then I just asked my whole team. I'm like, " So what do you think about this product? I don't know what's wrong. Maybe it's not a good product." And then they're like, " Well, nobody would buy the shirt. We don't like it. It's not a good product for the German marketplace." Sometimes, it's just not a good fit. Don't think that every best seller in the States will be a best seller in Europe. Sometimes, the mentality, the target audience will just not like your product and you can do your research in Facebook inaudible groups being like, " Hey, would you buy this product? Why not?" You can just do that on your own. You don't have to hire an expert or whoever does the product research. You can just do all these small things and be like, " Well, maybe I'm not going to go to Germany with my t- shirts because this sell..." But he was so eager to sell the shirts. He was like, " No, I can do that." We were like, " Well, so sorry, dude. You can't sell this. They're not going to sell." I don't know what happened at the end, but that was the feedback for him and literally every 12 people was like, " No, don't sell this in Germany." Very weird.

Ryan Cramer: inaudible I think a lot of people taking that next step, they either... Unless your camera freaks for a second, Jana, but I'll keep talking for now. For this, in this capacity, if you're expanding internationally, a lot of people don't think about the cultural aspects of it. Like you said, in terms of the aspect of if they're going to be moving internationally, they have to think about where people are just talking about or if they're going to be conversing in terms of some sort of language or again, if it's religious aspects or if it's people aspects or anything like that. I think a lot of the notion that people don't take that next step and become that brand that's being localized in that capacity. Do you expect a lot more people to start paying attention to those kinds of areas of being a brand and internationally speaking to those people, like you said, just asking or being sourceful in terms of that local culture? Or just, " Hey, I'm going to keep it consistent. I'm just going to sell it how it is and if they like it, they like it. They don't, they don't?" Do you think that's where people will separate themselves of taking that extra effort, that consideration, that, " Hey, maybe this product isn't for me and I'm going to stay away and work with just people that see a use for it or see use for the service or would want to buy this instead of trying to force it down, people servicing it and frustrated with that?"

Jana Krekic: You know what? That's a really good question. And that's also what I've been asking myself like, "Will people get it? Will people understand the whole point of this?" When I talk about that, it's not only because I have the service and like, " I want you to use my service." I have background in languages and 10 years in eCommerce and I understand how both work and I really want to help people make more money. But people don't have that mindset. Like what I mentioned. People really take care of the content in English because they're English speakers and they understand it. " But who cares how it sounds in French? I'm just going to do it and Google Translate will be fine. This will be good." Because people don't think about languages and people don't think about the target audience in Italy will be different than target audience in the U. S. That's a problem. People don't think about these things. And I know when... After they hear my podcast or when I talk live or whatever, a lot of sellers they approach me, they're like, " Wow, I was not aware of that," Or" I was not thinking about these things, but now I will think about that." And then they're like, " Oh, okay, I see what you mean." But I don't think that people will dedicate time or even think about these things without having someone to tell them like, " Hey, you really need to do this this way because it's hurting your listings and your sales." That's important. And unfortunately, I don't think that people will come around and be like, " This is what we need. This is how this needs to get done." So unless something major happens in this world, I think that I will constantly just going to try to-

Ryan Cramer: crosstalk forever.

Jana Krekic: ...get people understand that it is important and by doing machine translation or just doing it like, " Who cares about this?" That you are leaving so much money on the table because as I said, keywords and stuff like that, this is what's going to get those click through rates you want and the sales, but not the machines and other stuff because it's content, it's very, very important. How much you work in your English content, this is how you should work on your other international content as well because it's all very important. And what I said earlier, Europe is so good. UAE, Japan, all that is very good because you don't have a lot of those rules that you do have in the U. S. Some of them that they have it over there, they don't survive the transition to Europe. So a lot of them are never going to be implied ever. We still use caps lock in bullets and you can get away with that. It's not like they're going to ban your listing, for instance. There are tons of stuff like that. There are so many things and it's so much easier once you get your product into inventory, it's so much easier to get sales and be there, be present without any restrictions than you are in the U. S. marketplace. I think now as being a new seller, it's going to be harder than ever to sell on U. S. Amazon.

Ryan Cramer: What's that advice that you give people though? Has it changed in the last three years now? From three years ago, how are you telling people to approach now maybe becoming a new seller on Amazon whether it be brand off? Like you said, you work with CVS, Sephora, those are brands. As a new business owner and they say, " I have a product. We're selling direct to consumer and I'm trying to bring it on to Amazon." What are your advice that you're giving people now as they're starting out?

Jana Krekic: Well, as you're starting off, first, you have to try harder to find a good product now. Earlier it was like, " Yeah, you're going to be bestseller, no problem, because not many people are selling this product." Now, literally everybody's selling every single product there is. There's thousands of... If you think of the stupidest product you're going to have-

Ryan Cramer: Ten of them.

Jana Krekic: crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: You said 200, yeah.

Jana Krekic: Now, it's so hard. You really have to understand the whole... It's really hard to give advice. It's inaudible business to advise someone how to get started. But now with the supply chain issues and with tons of competitors and stuff like that, I think you have to spend a lot of time doing the research and then also really having enough of resources to go, " Let's go." Not to be just, " I'm going to spend..." You have to have your stock and you're going to be like, " Okay, let's do it properly." You have to get someone who's going to, if you don't know how to do it, just let go and talk to someone who's a consultant that helps people to start on Amazon and just listen to the steps and get everything ready. Be a nerd. Just going to follow all of that and do it. Now it's easier than ever to find someone who will help you as a coach or as a consultant because earlier it was maybe this masterclass or that masterclass for 49 bucks or whatever. Now, you can find a real life person that will go with you through all this process. So I would suggest getting someone who really knows what they're doing. I don't know. I love Sharon Even. She's great. When I have someone who wants to sell, I tell them talk to Sharon. She's amazing. Find somebody like that. If you don't want to do it, I would definitely suggest spending a lot of time doing the product research. It's very, very hard now to find a good product and I would definitely focus... If you don't want to deal with China, made in the U. S. is just gold right now. When people say made in the U. S., it gives you the little edge over your other competitors who don't have the made in U. S. product. It's definitely going to be a little bit more expensive, but for unforeseeable future, I think that will be definitely your key feature that it's made in U. S., for instance. And tons of stuff like that that you can incorporate, but you have to really make this whole research. You devoted a lot of time. People usually do that as a side hustle in the beginning, like 30 minutes a day or whatever. I say you have to really dedicate a lot of time to that because that definitely can be your full time job. I know a lot of people who quit their jobs and are doing full time now more than ever especially because of the COVID and all the circumstances we are in, people are just going all in with this online business in any direction.

Ryan Cramer: What's the thing that's still you feel like is the biggest hurdle that most people are going to have to overcome next year? Is it supply and logistics?

Jana Krekic: I think supply chain, definitely. I think it's probably going to get even worse if possible, but I think that's going to be such a bottleneck for a lot of things and a lot of problems. I think that definitely if you could... A lot of people do local sourcing because of all the things that bind in the supply chain and everything. People are turning from China, from Asia to locally produced products, which I think is great. And I also love to... You should support your local business in your own country and made in your country and stuff like that and be proud of it. I don't think that's necessarily bad. It's going to cost more. But I definitely think that overall, on Amazon, they're going to raise their fees for absolutely everything so it's not going to be as affordable as it was four or five years ago. So everything is going to go up, price wise, and only the strongest will stay. I think it's going to be a big cleanup from all those small sellers and people not dedicated off time and money and not investing a lot and the real Amazon core sellers are going to stay there definitely, which I also don't think is going to be that bad to just going to clean the space from all the little and unimportant sellers. It's going to be good for both consumers and the others. So I don't think necessarily that's going to be a bad thing that Amazon crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: Right. I'm not hearing consolidation in terms of only 100 people or 100 companies are selling on Amazon. I'm hearing just people who are doing the inaudible... And again, I think that's where Amazon's tactics have tried to shift in that direction of, " Hey, we're just trying to do it so that if you're capable and able, we're putting these barriers in place so that people don't skate by and they bring down the house of cards, essentially."

Jana Krekic: Exactly.

Ryan Cramer: Everything is going to be more solid and people can be consistent. They know what to expect and because it was such an anything can happen and there's all these ways to go around the machine instead of working with the machine, I think that there's a lot of consolidation because of that and that's why they're trying to reign everything in and say, " We want to work with you. This is how we see it's going to be protecting the consumer but also use the seller." And then if people think that's too difficult, so be it. Go find your own direct to consumer or go to Walmart, which you see a lot of people shifting. It's like, " All right, we'll-"

Jana Krekic: crosstalk Walmart.

Ryan Cramer: Walmart would do the same thing, but...

Jana Krekic: They will. Yeah. Eventually, they will. They will impose their own rules. And I agree, like what I said also at the beginning for the TOS, I think it's a good thing that they're going to be like, " Okay, you can't now manipulate ranking. It's not okay. We should all do it fair and square," whatever that means. I think it's okay that they are not going to allow certain things like black hats inaudible absolutely everything. So yeah.

Ryan Cramer: inaudible so in the few minutes we have left with you, what are you excited about? You alluded to it. Is it the learnings from people and just being able to interact or the continuing education on finding good sellers, service providers to work with in 2022? What's you and your team's main focus for the upcoming year? Have you guys had that meeting of, " All right. What's our plan for next year and this is what we're going to be shooting for?"

Jana Krekic: Yeah. Well, we haven't had the meeting, but we will have it really soon, as soon as we can find some time for that. But-

Ryan Cramer: Your guys are so busy. Yeah, exactly.

Jana Krekic: Yeah. Well, next year I'm really excited because we are going to build our own portal that we're going to use which will make our lives easier. We're going to have different... As a customer, you could log in and see where your project's at. If it's proofreading or doing keywords and stuff like that. For our translators, they could upload, download, and for our project managers that have the third login for the portal. So I think that's one of the major things that's happening inside of our company. So basically, next year is going to be all about optimizing our procedures, our services, everything. That's number one priority. Absolutely. And number two is definitely I would love to... We're starting doing something like that on social media, creating some really interesting posts that people would read, which actually lead to better understanding why is localization so important for us, not just localization but why is localization so important and why should people do it, like giving some really cool examples because also when I talk, if you just speak in theory, nobody will understand you until you get an example that everyone will understand. For instance, why is there no Starbucks in Australia? Because Starbucks did not localize to Australian coffee culture which is similar to Italian one and not U. S. pour over and frappuccinos and chocolaccinos and stuff like that so people didn't like it over there because they didn't localize and now they have to say goodbye to the whole continent. There's no single Starbucks coffee shop in Australia. So that's failing at localization. Some really interesting texts like that where I'm trying to get people more and more educated on the topic and understand how they could hurt their business. We would be striving to provide more and more content like that. I was just going to be happy when sellers would schedule a call or be like, " Hey, we want to work with you because we think localization is important." And I'll be like, " Yes, somebody understands it." I would love to get more and more sellers like that. Or even just sellers or other service providers I could talk to on that topic. I'm really passionate about languages, optimization, eCommerce, everything, and I'm just going to love talking about that because I think that is where the money's hiding at this point for a lot of different brands. So that's definitely going to be our focus in 2022. And yeah, definitely meeting you in person finally and just hanging out with fellow entrepreneurs and just exchanging stories and just having an insight like how somebody build their company from nothing and listening to their struggles and how they solve problems. That's the most beautiful part with being part of this business, how you can exchange different opinions, how you can see how somebody's doing things. Maybe you will help someone by telling them something that helped you and that way we, we all grow and learn together and that's the most rewarding thing in the world.

Ryan Cramer: Right. Sharing information but then also like building it up so everyone wins and can do better. I agree 100%, I'm with you. I feel like that this is a hidden area where optimization, if you do it correctly, you speak to that localized audience... Again, audience is not just zeros and ones. It's so much more nuanced than that. It's more than just male, female, age, anything like that. It's culture, and that's so hard to crack and people spend their entire lives inaudible just one culture, let alone how many are out there, languages. This international wave of eCommerce and how you can speak across the globe, no one's ever had to dive into that because of you were just focused on your main street store and just your local community. But now because of eCommerce, my widget can be sold on the other side of the world. Now, we have to start thinking about how to market to them. It's all so fascinating. I'm in your corner. I'll be cheering with you, trying to get people on our soapbox of this is where the money is and optimizing in this world. So super excited. If people want to get in touch with you on, I know we've connected and linked out to your profiles before, but YLT Translations is still same, still the best place to go if people want to learn more?

Jana Krekic: Yeah, definitely. You can go to our website and we have tons of really interesting content on our blog like resources, tons of stuff like that. And if you guys have any questions, if you need any advice, if you maybe want us to do an audit of your listings inaudible performing, maybe we can see why, what can be improved for absolutely free. You can definitely contact us through our website. Or you can shoot me an email at jana @ ylt- translations. com anytime.

Ryan Cramer: Awesome. Very good. And of course, we'll make sure we send people your way. We'll tag you in all of our posts. If you have questions, if you're not watching this live again, go ahead and just send a message to Jana: and her team. She gets back to you pretty quickly. I feel like you're never sleeping too. I feel like you're always up at random hours of the day when I'm working and don't know when you sleep, but that's the life of an entrepreneur, right?

Jana Krekic: Yeah, it is. It's like this, it's like, " Yes, I'm the king of the world." "I'm going to kill myself." " I'm losing my company." I'm billionaire." It's a great ride. Just enjoy the ride.

Ryan Cramer: Just got to stay even keel the whole time. I agree with you.

Jana Krekic: Yes.

Ryan Cramer: It's hard to do that, but hey, thanks so much for hopping on again.

Jana Krekic: Thank you so much for having me.

Ryan Cramer: Yeah. We'll talk after show a little bit and just catch up a little bit more, but thanks so much. Again, and thank you everyone else for hopping on another episode of Crossover Commerce. Thanks to Jana from YLT Translations, of course, a friend of the show, has hopped on a couple times, talking what she's seeing globally. Again, I would call her Mrs. Worldwide right now. She sees things on a global perspective that I think a lot of people are missing. So hopefully, you got to take away as an entrepreneur if you're listening to this or if you're watching this as a business owner, start think more culturally, start think more localized. It might be a lot of work up front, but again, I think this is truly where a lot of... There's an amount of business that can be had there and I think that's where a lot of growth can happen and be optimized and not a lot of people are thinking that way. So as business grows and your brain grows, this is where a lot of optimization can happen, a lot of touching different lives and different pocketbook and different marketplaces. The world is literally your oyster now, and it could be easier to get on those marketplaces and in front of people you never were able to have had before. That being said, this is episode one of two this week. Again, here in the United States, we have a holiday this week so we're going to take out the rest of the week, but tomorrow we have a great episode of 186. I'm going to be speaking with Will Haire of BellaVix. We're going to be advertising based on product maturity and have him on and talk about that before we take a quick break for Thanksgiving here in the United States, of course, and just watch how eCommerce unfolds over the weekend with Black Friday, Saturday, Monday, but we'll be back again next week. But again, thanks to Jana from YLT Translations. Get in touch with her as she mentioned. All the links are in the show notes below or if you're watching on social media, how to connect with her. I'm Ryan Cramer. This is Crossover Commerce. We'll catch you guys next time on another episode. Take care.