Borderless Ecommerce Trends

We wanted to share thoughts on the emerging trend of borderless ecommerce as we look for innovations in the space. Given the current political climate, borders and trade rules are an increasing area of volatility.

From manufacturer to consumer, global logistics is well over a trillion dollar market and retail ecommerce sales is pushing two trillion dollars globally.  We are seeing the movement of tech companies to support borderless ecommerce, technology used to bridge transactions where geographical borders prevent trade. The global market is a great opportunity for these companies and we have heard time and again as to how companies would like to set up an office in China to seize the local market opportunity, which is currently growing at 10% YoY.  We believe the US should participate in the global market, however, if the US is prevented from participating in the near term, we believe there is still a massive global opportunity for these emerging tech companies.  

Several entrepreneurs are focusing on the push to give consumers access to buy anything online, worldwide.  Innovations for this problem are emerging as: access to the consumer via curated marketplaces, interface layers to transact with US retailers typically blocked, SMB tech tools to intelligently process payments from international processors, and technology to increase shipping efficiency, especially cross-borders.

We see an exciting opportunity to expand ecommerce but are still looking for a defensible platform to solve this problem at scale.  We find that many companies struggle to attract one side of the marketplace and do not have a clear strategy on how they will grow it. They bring highly qualified expertise for one side but then tend to go too broad in their target audience on the other side or they believe the early traction they achieve in one market is repeatable in any similar market.  

We believe companies that use the borderless mindset to bring existing high-demand products online for the first time are in the best position to scale.  A successful company in this space will require the alignment of an expert entrepreneur, shared belief in tech adoption and distribution, and market focus.