Are you missing out on international sales because you cannot accept the payment options that your global customers want to use? We’ve found that people won’t buy what they don’t understand. The corollary is that they won’t buy what they can’t pay for. No, this isn’t about tight credit, but rather the ability of people to use their familiar methods of payment to buy online. While it’s second-nature to many Americans, PayPal isn’t the preferred way to pay in every country where you sell online.

Respondents to our survey of consumers in non-Anglophone countries told us that they often became frustrated and abandoned shopping carts when websites did not support their preferred payment methods. If you’re planning to sell products online outside your home market, you need to provision for this monetizable global customer experience level.

Our research shows that if you translate your site into other languages, you greatly increase the chance of grabbing the attention of consumers who speak those languages. If you take the next step and adapt the logistics of purchasing, that website localization will greatly increase the likelihood of someone hitting the buy button. Specifically, we found that customer buying experiences vary by their competence in the website’s language and localized practices. Many sites herd prospective buyers through several customer experience levels, only to throw them out right when they get to the money shot.

What is the financial, marketing, and branding cost of frustrating potential customers who can’t buy due to logistical or financial issues? There is limited data on why people abandon their shopping carts when buying internationally, but here are two datapoints that underscore the scope of the payment problem:

• European vendors refuse a third of transactions. A May 2007 draft report from the European Parliament found that only six percent of consumers buy from websites outside their home countries. One third who tried to buy had their business refused by the vendor. The report didn’t state the reason, but the inability to accept local payment methods tends to be a common reason for bouncing a transaction.

• American e-commerce numbers include foreign sales. On its Frequently Asked Questions page, the U.S. Census Bureau notes that its Monthly Retail Trade data on “e-commerce and total sales include sales covering all store and non-store retail locations in the United States operated by a firm in the survey. Sales made to a customer in a foreign country through a U.S. web site are included in the estimates.” In other words, U.S. firms aggregate all web sales, including foreign ones, into their revenue totals. How much bigger could that e-commerce number be if more companies supported top-to-bottom online sales to prospective buyers in other countries?

Every country has a variety of payment mechanisms that its residents prefer — your challenge is to support the most frequently used ones. Given more than 190 countries on the planet plus all the payment options that are available, we tell most companies to find a payment aggregator — such as Bibit, CyberSource, PacNet, and PayByCash — to do the work for them. How can you assess the ability of such companies to do the work? The first 2 questions we suggest are pretty straightforward: 1) Do they support the markets to which you want to sell? 2) Do they support transactions in the languages of those markets? In our recent report on global payments, we describe these and eight other questions you need to ask your prospective payment partner.