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Three Strategies to Grow Globally: An E-commerce Point of View
E-commerce in Europe reaches new heights
Regional challenges in ocean shipping can give the industry valuable insights into potential
global solutions and areas of opportunity. As the world’s largest, most active, multi-carrier ecommerce network for ocean freight, INTTRA is able to identify global and regional trends and
challenges and provide solutions to enable carriers and shippers to make dramatic gains in
efficiency through the adoption of e-commerce.
During a recent conversation with Hans Meindorfner, general manager of INTTRA EMEA, he
shared his insights on the state of e-commerce within Europe, and how INTTRA has overcome
regional challenges to provide the tools, talent and processes to address them through ecommerce adoption.
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Arm yourself with language and local industry experts. According to analysis
completed using data provided by INTTRA, e-commerce usage has been growing at a
steady rate for the past year in Europe by nearly 30%. Italy alone has seen an increase
in e-commerce usage of nearly 72%. In order to achieve this growth, language and
cultural barriers had to be overcome. INTTRA was able to achieve success by using
local specialists in Italy that are fluent in the language and are knowledgeable about the
specific regional challenges faced in ocean shipping. By having local specialists able to
work with companies in Italy, the adoption of e-commerce happened at a much more
rapid pace than ever before. INTTRA is employing this approach throughout the global
shipping community and seeing an increase in e-commerce adoption throughout the
world.
•
Work with local partners to promote adoption and growth. Company history and
varying cultural traditions can create a myriad of challenges for any company looking to
grow globally. One way that this challenge can be overcome is by working with local
partners to help bridge the knowledge and cultural gap. INTTRA’s alliance partner
network has helped them bring e-commerce to new areas of the globe. By working with
one such alliance partner, Amital, INTTRA has seen e-commerce usage in Israel spike
136%. With Amital’s help and knowledge of the local industry, INTTRA is helping to
bring increased efficiency to a wider global community.
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Recognize the changing dynamics of the workforce and use it to your advantage.
The next generation of workers is pushing for increased innovation and efficiency
through the use of online tools. As we had mentioned in last month’s issue of iNews,
this trend is being seen across the globe. According to Hans Meindorfner, Europe is no
exception. The wide use of e-commerce at home on sites such as Amazon by the
younger demographic has created a demand for similar tools at work that increase
efficiency and are easier to use than the manual processes currently being used by
many ocean freight companies across the globe. Now with younger employees making
up a larger portion of the workforce, more efficient tools are being adopted at a faster
pace than ever before. By keeping up with the pace of the younger demographics’
ability to adapt to new technology and their increased demand for more efficient tools,
electronic solutions are providing the innovation and technological touch point the
younger generation desires and the streamlined processes companies need to stay
competitive in the global market.
Hans left us with one closing thought. As e-commerce usage grows globally and more
information becomes digitized, solutions are continuously being enhanced and developed to
address other challenges faced by the industry, such as consistent performance and on-time
reliability. With the increase in e-commerce in Europe, soon tools like OceanMetrics, the first,
and only, neutral business insights platform, which provides actionable performance
measurements based on actual carrier and shipper transactions, can be adopted to address
these other obstacles to global growth and increased efficiency.
INTTRA recognizes the challenges the ocean shipping industry faces as it continues to
become more efficient and productive. By addressing these challenges with new innovative ecommerce solutions, INTTRA will continue to help the industry streamline processes and
improve quality of service.
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