London menswear brand Percival is seeing major growth in the international market with the adoption of its Global-e-commerce tool

The adoption of the plug-in for Shopify’s e-commerce back end system has allowed British men’s fashion house, Percival Menswear, to dramatically increase its revenue internationally – with its international conversion rate increasing by 180%, its total non-UK orders by 766%, and revenue cross-border 897% in just seven months.

During the same year-over-year comparison timeframe, the London-headquartered company also saw a 174% increase in international traffic conversion rates.

Percival may also stop supporting twin ecommerce websites, which founder and Creative Director Chris Gove sees as the only way to try non-UK expansion.

D2C, yes – but D2C in only one market, no

Based in Hackney, East London, the Gove company is dedicated to subverting classic assumptions about men’s fashion, and whose business model is to sell directly to customers to ensure its products are as effective as possible. He says:

The wholesale business model in my industry is that you will design a collection in sample form, build one of each piece you want to produce a year in advance, and then sell it to the buyer. They then put their order in and you create a production run which takes about six, seven months and then you ship it to the store.

But the problem is about a year before you make any money. To manufacture any garment is thousands of pounds and as we saw with COVID, if all the shops go out of business there is no way to pay the bills.

Gove – who says his work is inspired by minimalist architecture, monochrome marble, matte black coffee pots, Japanese woodblock prints and David Lynch – has earned great acclaim for his clothing seen on A-Listers such as Sebastian Stan, Kit Harington, Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield , Benedict Cumberbatch, and Chris Evans.

However, given the D2C (direct to consumer) business philosophy, it is far from easy to match that high profile with easy access for potential buyers who are not based in the UK.

To offer international customers access to its range, Percival felt compelled to create a parallel US website with its main UK site – the latter dealing with all international markets except the United States.

However for all non-UK markets except the US, Percival only offers prices in British pounds, so global buyers must estimate purchase prices in their local currency.

All sales made in this way are subject to transaction fees and lack transparency due to international currency exchange rates, reducing buyer incentives.

A further hurdle for non-UK purchases, Gove said, was that he was unable to provide potential international customers with accurate calculations of duties and taxes, or even the option to prepay those fees at checkout.

He says:

We’re seeing a lot of organic traffic mainly from the US and some areas in Europe. And the problem with Shopify is that even though it’s a great platform for a million things, when you start trying to service new territories at different price points and trade more globally, it doesn’t account for all of the import fees and other shipping costs and things that you might do. bring. It also won’t give you a native language checkout – and for conversions in other regions, things like that are very important.

Our conversions are perfectly healthy in England, but not abroad. We do it natively on Shopify and add up some of the costs and add a hefty shipping fee at the end to account for a lot of things.

All of this makes D2C outside the UK expensive, as customers have to pay additional fees when their orders arrive. Finally, non-US sites can only offer a limited set of payment options – and if a buyer only goes to a UK site out of frustration, the high international shipping rates are the final barrier to conversion.

Gove said he knew the situation couldn’t last much longer, and that maintaining parallel sites like this was also a drain on the resources of his fast-growing – but still small – company.

Fortunately, he found a solution through conversations with other dot com entrepreneurs facing the same international payment problem.

That is in the form of an end-to-end cross-border e-commerce solution called Global-e. He says:

What Global-e gives you is a native language checkout for every country on the planet. So immediately, overseas site visitors can trust what you see in the end as there is no confusion about what the subtotals, totals, shipping costs and T&Cs are.

That’s very important, obviously, because when it comes to online shopping, where you’re not in the store, you’re not touching the fabric and looking at the product itself, and those little conversion levers that help the customer really benefit you as a retailer.

Selling on a scale we couldn’t before

Gove says the only other way to offer this local support is to separate URLs with sites in multiple languages, which isn’t practical for a company of his size.

He also likes the fact that the product allows him to have accurate price coefficients, i.e. adjusting the price of a particular product for a region, not blanket prices.

But overall, it’s the automated handling of all US state taxes and other fiscal technicalities when paying in international markets that makes his job a lot easier as a business owner based outside of the US.

The next step for Percival — named, incidentally, in honor of Gove’s grandfather, who died just as he was starting the business — is a major push into the New York and LA markets, as the team has noticed the natural affinity of its unique offerings to some of the audience there.

Gove concludes that he is still very happy with his main ecommerce engine. He says:

We have Shopify to manage all of our product inventory, and the backend is still flawless. We will continue to use this, we just have this very useful cross-border plug-in capability over the top and when checking out as an app.

We didn’t really have to do anything with it, we paid a small share of the rev to the vendors, but it basically opened up the world for us to sell at a scale we couldn’t before.