Your e-commerce business might be leading you to unexpected destinations. The Internet's reach is immense—57% of the population in the Middle East is online, according to Internet World Stats, representing a market of 142 million people.

The e-commerce playbook offers valuable strategies for discovering your market and making it easy for your market to find you. Remarkably, whether you're selling locally or internationally, the principles remain largely the same. In fact, expanding globally is a natural step for e-commerce businesses, regardless of their size.

So, that part is straightforward. However, when it comes to financial matters, ensuring your money reaches your bank account safely can be more complicated than accessing a new international market.

In a world of more than 120 currencies, how do you manage the financial logistics of offering products for sale in local currencies across the world? And how then do you manage your overseas customers wanting to pay in their own local currency?

So you’ve potentially got everything from Guatemalan quetzales to Mongolian tugriks coming in, in a mishmash of payments. Do you decide yourself how and when to convert them to your home currency? Do you leave it to banks to convert at the point of the transaction, and, shuddering, shoulder the expense?

Or do you just give up and insist that your customers pay you in your own currency? If you do that, there’s a pretty good chance that the problem will go away. Along with your customers.

Check with your online payment partner. Every e-commerce website accepting online payments has one, and it might well be that yours can help. The good ones have grown alongside their merchants and will try to match their merchants’ mindset of ‘local going global.’

This means that they won’t have a single solution or structure that they expect you to fit into—rather, they will have a variety of options that will flex and expand with you as you expand yourself.

Often, the evolution looks something like this:

First, your payment gateway allows you, the merchant, to consolidate all payments in various currencies into a single bank account. For example, if you're based in Dubai, you can aggregate receipts from buyers in different countries, all converted into AED, into one account in Dubai. At this stage, convenience is the key benefit.

But then, as you become more acclimatized to managing your cash flow in a range of currencies, your payment gateway flexes again.

It enables you to keep your payments in the currencies of your choice. Because as you reach a certain scale, it can make more sense to pool money from your international buyers in specific currencies so that you can pay directly to your international vendors—drivers, manufacturers, traders or agents—in their currency of choice.

This strategy helps avoid double conversion costs: initially when converting funds from international buyers into your local currency, and later when converting your local currency back into the currencies required to pay your vendors.

And then your operations in overseas countries start to take on a life of their own. Your payment gateway flexes yet again—and now you can settle your local currencies in the home countries of buyers, either because you see high growth there, or in order to comply with local country regulations. Your collections are run locally. You’ve gone global.

E-commerce has made it straightforward to access overseas markets – but it’s not without its complications.

Choose your payment gateway wisely, though, and it’ll live up to its promise of opening the door to new markets.

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