MCM Outlook 2014: U.S. Merchants are Spanning the Globe

U.S.-based merchants are growing their cross-border business. According to the MCM Outlook 2014 survey results, merchants here are shipping an average of 9.8% of orders outside the U.S. But the majority of merchants (64.1%) ship from 0% to 4% of orders across borders.

Meanwhile, 40.5% of respondents said they are using marketplaces such as Amazon, Rakuten and Alibaba to sell globally.

Craig Reed, vice president of global commerce for Pitney Bowes, said in an interview at IRCE 2013 that selling products globally is about having access to another market. While the U.S. market has shown a lot of growth and has been very robust, it is slowing down.

“As a merchant, you want to look at what is the next big stage of growth, it’s really international,” said Reed. “The growth of ecommerce, we believe, is going to be driven in part by global demand.”

There has been a shift in what shipper respondents use as their primary international carrier. Last year, exactly one-third of respondents said the United States Postal Service was their primary international shipper. This year, just 18.2% of respondents are using the USPS.

UPS has seen its global business grow. More than one-quarter of the respondents (25.6%) said they use UPS as their primary international carrier, up from 23.8% last year.

FedEx saw a slight drop in global business, with 18.2% of respondents (down from 19% in 2013) using them as their primary international carrier.

DHL is seeing a re-birth in the U.S. Just 2.4% of respondents said they used DHL as its primary international carrier last year; that number jumped to 12.4% in 2014.