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by yorwba
1950 days ago
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It's not localization that's stopping European companies from taking over the entire EU market, it's competition from other companies. If a French company wants to expand into the Spanish market, they can localize their app all they want; if their prospective customers in Spain are already using a different app that works just as well, they're going to have a hard time convincing them to switch. The same dynamic also applies within countries, where two interchangeable apps might dominate in different areas or demographics of the same country, without either able to gain significant market share from the other, but it's a bit rarer because of network effects, where people start using an app because they know someone else using it and the app with the most users grows the fastest, eclipsing the competition. Cross-border network effects in Europe are much weaker than within countries, and not much stronger than between European and non-European countries, so if a company manages to dominate their niche across all of Europe, they'll probably also win in much of the rest of the world. |
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It very much is about localization - both language and to some extent also culture. Both are notable problems with b2c, and there are no "good enough" automated solutions.
My point of reference is the success of Polish domestic "Allegro" ecommerce platform, which was able to out-fox EBay, and later on Amazon, and still maintains dominant position on the local market. There were no significant technological advantages, nor any notable political connections. The platform won purely on being local.
In spite all the local success the platform could not expand to the west of Poland due to localization (language and partly culture). It did expand a little bit to Ukraine and Czech Republic. And while it's possible to browse foreign offers, it's rather rare to do so - due to the language barrier.