Anyone who walked past the QEII Centre in London yesterday can hardly have missed the fact that Payoneer were in town. The entire venue was flanked by an honour guard of Payoneer flags flying from every available flagpole to mark the Payoneer Forum 2019.
This was Payoneer’s third major event in the UK, having launched the UK Payoneer Forum in London in 2017, it visited Manchester in 2018 and was back in London this year and the Payoneer Forum 2019 was their biggest UK event to date with over 200 people there on the day.
Opened by Jonny Steel, VP of Marketing at Payoneer, the theme for the Forum was ‘Go Beyond’. Naturally, as Payoneer are a payments enabler for cross border trade, attendees were presented with a deluge of marketplaces, tools and services to help them expand their businesses overseas. Immediately following Jonny was a panel session with Amazon, CDiscount and Mercado Libre discussing trading globally.
Daniel Mayhew, Country Manager UK for Payoneer talked about optimising your business to expand globally. However he also had exciting news to share that Payoneer are introducing Capital Advances for small businesses trading on marketplaces. They’ll advance up to 100% of your turnover on marketplaces to be repaid gradually over time and we’ll have more details soon.
Daniel was followed by talks on the indepth opportunities marketplaces such as CDiscount in France (with Brexit in mind, you can ship your stock to CDiscount and they’ll fulfil orders locally for your), Mercado Libre (the biggest marketplaces in South America), Amazon (New opportunities opening up in Australia and why you should partner with Amazon) and yet more from Newegg and Rakuten later in the day.
There was also practical advice including the experts from Avalara dissecting the intricacies of US Sales Tax and how to handle it including reporting requirements and the notifications you need to send to consumers (An interesting tidbit – Did you know that if you sell a Pumpkin for food there’s no sales tax but if you sell it to be carved for Halloween that sales tax has to be charged!).
Finally one of the stand out sessions of the day was presented by Barney Willis, Managing Director Managed Partners at We Are Pentagon. Barney shared down to earth practical advice on preparing to Go Beyond and take your business global.
If you missed the Payoneer Forum 2019, look out for their future events as they are invaluable for any online retailer looking to take their business global. We’ll be back for the Payoneer Forum 2020, but we hear they will have some smaller meetup events before then to be announced shortly.