Regional Plays Matter

Every brand dreams of going global. Fewer brands realize that "global" is really just a collection of local markets, each with its own marketplaces, language quirks, and shopping habits. Treat them all the same and your expansion plan stalls before it starts.

Michael Maher sat down with James Dihardjo, co-founder of MerchantSpring, to talk about what international selling actually looks like once you get past the US and UK. His answer: it looks a lot more crowded, and a lot more local, than most sellers expect.

Amazon Is Not The Only Game In Town

In the US, Amazon dominates the conversation. Step outside that market and the picture changes fast. James Dihardjo described an Australian retail landscape packed with domestic marketplaces that regularly outperform Amazon in specific categories, even as Amazon's own traffic in the country has grown roughly thirtyfold in four years. France tells a similar story, with platforms like Cdiscount, Fnac, and Rakuten pulling meaningful volume alongside Amazon and eBay.

"There are really serious players here in Australia. I mean, there are more marketplaces here than I've probably had hot meals."

— James Dihardjo, Co-Founder at MerchantSpring

The lesson is simple. If you plan an expansion around Amazon alone, you are leaving demand on the table in markets where local platforms already have the customer's trust and habit.

Regional Players Deserve Regional Respect

Michael Maher drew a useful comparison to US grocery. Kroger owns Fred Meyer and Smith's, but a shopper in Florida cares about Publix, not Kroger's parent brand. The same logic applies overseas. Sellers who assume one marketplace strategy will cover a whole region are usually wrong, because the winning platform changes country by country and sometimes category by category.

"The point I'm trying to make is the retail landscape, at least digitally here, is more and more marketplaces are coming. Each one seems to be just as high performing as the next, or depending on the category may even outperform Amazon or even eBay."

— James Dihardjo, Co-Founder at MerchantSpring

Localization Is More Than Translation

A literal translation of your Amazon listing will not convert the way you think it will. Michael Maher pointed to a conversation with a translation specialist who explained that German shoppers respond to technical, spec-driven copy, while US buyers respond to lifestyle-driven storytelling. Get the tone wrong and the listing reads as untrustworthy, even if the grammar is perfect.

"Even within the English-speaking countries, there are material differences in language. For example, we don't use the word flip-flop here."

— James Dihardjo, Co-Founder at MerchantSpring

That single example says a lot. If Australia and the US, two English-speaking markets, need different word choices, imagine the gap between the US and Germany, or the US and Japan. Localization means rethinking word choice, tone, and the level of technical detail a category demands, not just running copy through a translation tool.

What This Means For Brands

• Map the marketplaces that actually matter in each target country before you launch, not after.
• Budget for local fulfillment realities. Not every country has the equivalent of Fulfilled by Amazon everywhere yet.
• Rewrite listing copy for tone and detail level per market, don't just translate word for word.
• Watch how domestic platforms respond to Amazon's presence. Service standards rise across the board once Amazon enters a market.
• Treat digitally native growth and brick and mortar growth as connected goals, not separate strategies.

The Service Bar Keeps Rising

James Dihardjo shared an anecdote about his mother ordering AirPods on Amazon Australia and receiving them the next morning, a level of speed that instantly changed her shopping habits. That is the real threat regional sellers face. It is not just competition for search rank, it is competition for a customer's baseline expectation of what fast and easy should feel like. Once Amazon sets that bar in a country, every other marketplace and every direct to consumer brand has to clear it or explain why they can't.

Expansion is still worth pursuing. It just rewards the sellers who study each market on its own terms rather than copying and pasting a playbook that worked at home.