$40 Billion In Cross-Border Latino Retail Sales

Posted: September 25th, 2009 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Hispanics, International, Latam | No Comments »

This post originally appeared on MediaPost’s Engage:Hispanics column.

How much do Mexicans spend annually on trips into the U.S.? Forty billion dollars annually, according to Jennifer Stefano, CEO of Border Billboard, who spoke at the Hispanic Retail 360 conference recently, citing a number of Scarborough and chamber of commerce studies.Do retailers credit this revenue toward a U.S. Hispanic audience or a foreign, Latino (Spanish-speaking) consumer? Either way, the 206 million people (Bureau of Transportation, 2008) that cross the border from Mexico into the U.S. every year increasingly represent a critical piece of revenue for retailers in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

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How to Grow Your e-commerce Business with U.S. Hispanics

Posted: July 23rd, 2009 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Hispanics, International, Latam | No Comments »

This article originally appeared on MediaPost’s Engage:Hispanics column.

How can you grow e-commerce by targeting the 25 million Hispanics online? Let’s look at a case study comparing two major retailers and how they managed their “U.S. Hispanic” sites. We can learn a lot from their successes and mistakes.

The Home Depot vs. Best Buy

The Home Depot launched its Spanish-language e-commerce site for U.S. Hispanics in early 2009, hoping to reach a new audience and grow a new profit center. After only four months, The Home Depot shut the site down because many of its visitors came from Latin America and Spain. The site was set up to accept credit cards only from the U.S. Nevertheless, Spanish-language consumers internationally very clearly communicated their interest in home improvement content online and e-commerce by visiting The Home Depot’s “U.S. Hispanic” site.

Since The Home Depot has 75 stores in Mexico, many Mexicans already knew the brand and easily found the site via search. They were surely pleased that the retailer was “speaking their language” online. Unfortunately, The Home Depot’s organizational structure (U.S. versus Mexican business units) clashed with the international, borderless nature of the Internet and its “U.S. Hispanic” e-commerce venture failed.

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Welcome to dotGlobal, Growing G-commerce Revenues Internationally

Posted: July 18th, 2009 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Innovation, Interactive Marketing, International | No Comments »

We are pleased to announce the launch of dotGlobal, a new global e-commerce and media consultancy, focusing on growing g-commerce, or global e-commerce, and media revenues internationally. This blog will feature tips and research about the growth potential that this new market represents.

Thank you to Erin Rauk, Matt Wilson, and Tim Brunelle at the Minneapolis Interactive Marketing Association for inviting me to their Localization & Internationalization breakfast this past Wednesday, where I announced the launch of the consultancy. It was a very well-organized event with smart attendees who asked a lot of great questions. See here for my presentation, which explains the growth opportunities in this market: