Subscription Box Answers

Going Global: How to Take Your Box to New Countries

• Liam Brennan

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In this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I share how you can test your subscription box in new countries using a method called direct inject. This is the strategy we used to expand BusterBox from Ireland to the UK quickly, without massive overheads.

If you have a question you'd like answered on the show, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the free Facebook group, and post your question there!

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the questions, you ask the questions, you ask the questions. Liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 2:

Welcome back to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers. Hope you're having a good day. Today we are chatting about expanding your subscription box business to a different country. I've had a few people reach out and ask me about this. They may be in the US and they want to expand to Europe, or they're in a country in Europe and they want to expand to a different country, or whatever. I'm going to share what we did in BusterBox so you can hopefully learn from it. I'm not going to get into the specifics around sales tax or anything like that or the laws in different countries. I'm just going to share what we did in booster box to expand from ireland to the uk. So this is back in 2016.

Speaker 2:

Now we obviously knew at the time that the UK could be potentially a much bigger market, because Ireland is pretty small. The UK is much bigger. There's way more dogs in the UK, so it was always on our agenda to go to the UK one day. Now, when we set up BusterBox, originally we only charged in Euro. That's it. And for any of my American friends who are listening, in case you don't know, in Ireland we charge in Euro and in the UK the currency is Pound. So we charged in Euro and to allow people to buy in the UK, we turned the setting on in Subway and we turned on a shipping charge in the UK because obviously it would be a lot more expensive to ship our boxes to the UK. So the way we had it set up was shipping was free in Ireland and if somebody from the UK purchased I think they paid like five pound extra for shipping. That that was pretty much it and we got advertising. Now we weren't really getting anybody signed up in the uk. It was really expensive. Okay, the customer acquisition cost was really expensive and it was really hard to get people to buy. And what we found out very quickly was the fact that we were charging in Euro was stopping people buying because they're signing up to a subscription and the currency conversion rate is changing all the time. So if you sign up to a six month subscription, you want to know exactly what you're paying every month. You don't really want to be thinking, oh, it might get a bit more expensive if the currency changes and the extra shipping charge was really putting people off as well.

Speaker 2:

So we mainly focused on Ireland and we got Ireland to I believe it was a thousand subscribers. We scaled it to a thousand subscribers. We were on TV, we were running Facebook ads, we were on Dragon's Den, we were doing a lot of stuff and we hit a thousand and we were finding it difficult to go much higher than a thousand in Ireland at the time. So we knew if we really wanted to push this business on, we would have to find a way to make the UK work, and that's exactly what we did. So the first thing we did was we added a multiple currency option to our website. Now, at the time this wasn't supported on Subli I don't believe it was supported but they helped us come up with a hack so it could be added to our website and we actually still have that hack on our website now and it works so well for us.

Speaker 2:

If you head over to busterboxcom and you head down our sewing up flow, you will see exactly what I mean, because the first step that pops up on the sewing up flow is a uk and a ir Irish flag side by side and it's like choose your country. If you pick the UK flag, it redirects you to a UK sign up flow and we have a UK Subli account plugged into that where we charge in pounds, and if you pick the Irish flag, it will obviously bring you to a Irish sign up flow and we have a Irish account plugged in in Euro. So we have two separate Subway accounts one for Ireland, one for the UK and if we ever go to another country we will most likely do the exact same thing. Say, if we pushed ahead and we launched in France, well then we would probably have a French flag and it would redirect to a French Subway account. It's worked really well for us.

Speaker 2:

Now, something else that we had to learn was the price sensitivity in the UK is completely different to the Irish market. In Ireland you can actually charge a bit more for the box compared to the UK. In the UK the consumers we found in the pet niche are a lot more price sensitive, so that's something you may have to consider in your own subscription box business. If you are going to a different country, the pricing may not be the same and you should look into what the average person earns in that country. All this data is available online you should look at like. For us it was a bit easier because we could see what and pet shops are charging for certain products and stuff. But you should do the same research for your niche to try and find the ideal price, because you may end up going into a country expecting to be able to charge a certain amount and then very quickly you find out that is simply not the case. You can't charge it, people aren't buying your insurance high and people are saying it's not worth it and you have to readjust your pricing. Or you may go into the country and you may be able to charge a lot more for your product. But it really is something you need to consider because pricing can be wildly different depending on the country.

Speaker 2:

But anyway, we got set up anyway and we tested some different pricing options and we found out what would actually work in the UK for the consumers and what would work for our business as well. So once we had that dialed in, we then had to figure out how we would ship to the UK. How were we going to do this? At the time we were a relatively new company and it simply wouldn't have been possible to go and hire a fulfillment center in the UK and ship half of our products to Ireland and half to the UK. It simply wouldn't have worked for our company. At the time it was too early, so we came up with a hack, something called Direct Inject, and we've done this for quite a long time and it worked really well for us. Now, if you're looking to expand into a new country, this may be a really good way to do it.

Speaker 2:

Let me explain how it worked. So it was called direct inject and we got in touch with a lot of different courier companies in ireland and we figured out who would be the best value company to ship pallets of boxes pre-packed boxes from our warehouse in Dublin directly into the UK. So we found the company anyway that would do this. We then got in touch with all of the courier companies in the UK and we found out number one, who would accept direct inject, and number two, who will give us the best rate. So that was it. We were set up and we were ready to ship into the UK.

Speaker 2:

So this is how it worked. Every week we would fill up a number of pallets for new UK customers. These pallets would contain packed boxes. We would pack all of our boxes in Dublin. They'd all be packed and they'd be wrapped up on a pallet and they would all contain an individual shipping label from the UK courier. The Irish shipping company would then come and they would collect the pallets and they would ship them directly to the courier in the UK. The courier in the UK would accept the delivery. They would then break down the pallets and they would ship out the boxes in the UK, because all of the boxes had the shipping labels on them already labels on them already.

Speaker 2:

And obviously the reason we did this is because it's way cheaper to ship a pallet to a country than it is to ship thousands of individual boxes. So you will pay the cost to ship the pallet. I can't remember exactly what it was at the time. I think at one point it was actually only 60 to 70 euro per pallet, and the pallets will contain I can't even remember the exact amount, but it will be over 100 boxes anyway a good bit over 100 boxes, I think, if I remember correctly. So the finances on it worked perfectly and then, yeah, they'd arrive in the UK and they get shipped out as normal. Now. We did that for a very long time and the only reason we actually stopped doing it was because of Brexit. It simply wasn't possible to do it from Ireland into the UK at the time because of Brexit, it was becoming a lot of hassle, so we actually moved our fulfillment center to the UK around Brexit time because we simply never had a choice, but it worked really well for a long time now.

Speaker 2:

The reason why I'm sharing this is you may be looking to go to another country and you may be looking to keep your expenses low. You want to possibly test things before fully committing to getting set up with a fulfillment center and all those costs. Direct inject may work for you. It just depends on the country you're shipping to and what the pallet price is and what the laws are. But it should definitely be something you should consider because it can be a really quick and effective way of expanding into another country without breaking the bank. But yeah, that's our story anyway, how we went from ireland to the uk and how we got it to work, and very quickly the uk became our main market because, like I said, it's much bigger than the irish market and, yeah, within like a very short amount of time we were driving way more volume in the uk and if we stayed exclusively in ire, ireland, we simply never would have went anywhere because the market isn't big enough.

Speaker 2:

Anyway. I hope this episode helps you if you're thinking about expanding into another country now. We'll be back next week at the exact same time and, as always, if you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free Facebook group and post your question there. And can I ask you a big favor? If you've been listening for a while and you've got value from this episode or any of the episodes and you're enjoying the content, would you mind giving me a quick review? It can be on apple spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. It just helps me get the show out to more people. Thanks very much and chat to you next week. Bye.