With the critical Q4 and Black Friday through to Christmas selling season fast approaching, not to mention Brexit Day looming in March next year, we want to learn more about how sellers are considering their shipping arrangements and how they manage their postal and courier services to best effect. To find out your views we are running a Tamebay
International Expansion Survey and are particularly interested in the views of sellers who turn over £1m a year or more.
We are commissioning the Tamebay International Expansion Survey with GFS, specialist in enterprise carrier management, to discover more about how you currently manage you carriers and the challenges you face in shipping not just in the UK but around the world.
The UK is preparing for an independent trade policy once we leave the EU with the DTI already surveying companies on prospective free trade agreements with Australia, New Zealand, and the United States and potentially seeking accession to the CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) and it’s encouraging to see such steps to ensure the UK can trade freely around the world. However online retailers, especially those who scale their business to multi-million pound enterprises, tend to trade with countries regardless of trade agreements and the only thing that generally holds them back is the ability to ship and track products to a destination.
If you are a seller scaling your business and selling overseas we want to hear from you and will be focussing on three particular areas:
- The challenges to international growth, and where delivery sits within that
- How retailers plan to overcome these challenges
- What you consider to be most important international overseas territories now that we have Brexit
We will be collating the anonymised submissions to the survey with a view to presenting the results in a webinar in early Autumn to discuss the challenges that Brexit may bring and how retailers can prepare, and of course taking a look at the upcoming Black Friday peak selling season and how carrier management can ensure a trouble free Q4.
As a thank you for taking part in the survey, we will be holding a weekly prize draw with £100 Amazon gift card up for grabs. The draw will take place once a week for four weeks with everyone who has completed the survey entered, so the sooner you enter the more chances you’ll have to win.
You can complete the Tamebay International Expansion Survey here, and thanks in advance for your input which as always we really appreciate.
4 Responses
I don’t know whether to be saddened or annoyed that you’re only focusing on ecommerce businesses doing £1m+ per annum.
We fall a little below that, and the approach you’re adopting perfectly illustrates a key barrier to growth that we see over and over again.
If you run a small or micro-business, it’s made perfectly clear that (no matter how fast you are growing) you’re not likely to be a big enough cash cow to be interesting or worth helping.
Whether it’s courier companies, software providers, government bodies, or business support services, there is virtually NO support or help until you get over an arbitrary threshold. But it’s fast-growing smaller and micro-businesses who most need that help to get them through this glass ceiling !
Hi Chris – that’s fair, thank you for explaining. Maybe I was being a bit over-sensitive 🙂
Perhaps in future, it would be worth thinking about doing two surveys simultaneously, tailored to the different sizes of business concerned. Or maybe even create a section in the “Topics” part of the main menu specifically to pull together articles focussed onspecifically relevant to helping micro-businesses to grow.