Dropshipping Expansion: Ebay Expands Into BRIC Markets

Brazil, Russia, India and China are the 4 nations that make up BRIC - and are speedily becoming popular spots for dropshipping suppliers and private label shipping firms. It is essentially a collection of nations with swiftly building economies, and eBay has set its sights on them all.

Why The BRIC Matters

These 4 nations are much less of a geopolitical entity like the European Union or African Union and are far more akin to the G7 - albeit a younger, much less mature version of it. The BRIC, however, is various from emerging markets like most of South-East Asia or Africa due to the reality that the BRIC currently has a considerable chunk of infrastructure like roads, courier services and world wide web access set in place. This tends to make trade significantly less complicated to conduct business than in emerging nations where the infrastructure is either outdated or is in the process of being (slowly) put into place - making the BRIC an ideal place for e-commerce.

Exactly where eBay Comes Into The Image

Dropshipping to the BRIC nations is rather hard for most of the world mostly because of the language barrier. Each country in the BRIC has its personal national language, making it extremely hard to sell anything - much less move wholesale products via a dropshipper. You would typically have to find out at least the fundamentals of a language to move products in just one particular part of the BRIC. If you want to appeal to all the member nations of the BRIC, you would essentially have to study up on 5 languages to do so. eBay, however, plans to make wholesale and dropshipping a lot less complicated by hiring one particular of the world's foremost authorities on machine translation - Hassan Sawaf.

Sawaf's group of data scientists are essentially tasked to create a search engine for eBay that will let users to find the products they are seeking no matter what language they use. For instance, a Russian user would search utilizing Russian text. The engine to be constructed by Sawaf's group will interpret the terms utilised by the said Russian and connect these terms to relevant things listed in English text.

What This Means For Retailers And Dropshipping Businesses

Merely put, you will be able to market a variety of products like watches and digital cameras to BRIC nations without getting to worry a lot about the language barrier. You essentially sell your products in English and users in the said nations will be able to make an order for your things if they so want. This technology will also mean that eBay will get far more potential consumers from the BRIC nations since it can be applied to other branches like payments and shipping. This in turn will also translate to far more potential buyers on your end as long as you perform with a trusted reseller that can get your products to the customers on time, every time.

eBay is, however, presently focusing far more on Russia, Brazil and other Latin-American markets. This implies that the benefits of Sawaf's work will at the moment only translate Russian, Spanish and Portugese for retail and dropshipping purposes. And even if eBay's attempt at machine translation is promising, it is no assure that it will surpass or even match the business observed by local auction and resale internet sites. This is why eBay is focusing far more on Brazil and Russia instead of China and India as local competitors in the latter two nations have a considerable lead over eBay.

The bottom line: If you want to test the by dropshipping goods to potential buyers in the BRIC nations, then eBay's new drive at machine translation will make the introduction less complicated. This can pave the way to help you far better recognize neighborhood demand and profit potential before completely committing extra time and sources penetrating these markets!

Adeel is the PR manager of Chinavasion: the online wholesaler and dropship company of Dropshipping Suppliers from China.