California Apparel News

When Tommy Bahama was looking to take its website global, the company knew it didn’t want to do it on its own. After taking a year to develop a site just for Canada, the Seattle-based brand wanted help expanding the site to other parts of the globe.

“It seems like it would be very simple—they’re right across the border,” said Lisa Atwood, the company’s senior vice president of e-commerce. “But the complexities of doing duties, taxes, customs and logistics from the U.S. to inner Canada is really complex, so it took us a long time to design the ability to ship to our Canadian neighbors.”

In comparison, the resort and lifestyle brand started working with New York–based FiftyOne Global Ecommerce in January, and within six months, the retailer had launched its website in more than 100 countries.

Now when a customer comes to the Tommy Bahama website, the site can detect if it’s an international IP address and the site will automatically customize itself to that user, including allowing customers to purchase in either U.S. dollars or their own currency, Atwood explained.

“What they provide is a very quick go-to-market for every country,” she said.

FiftyOne initially started as E4X, a company designed to help online retailers with currency-exchange rates.

After Chief Executive Michael DeSimone came on board in 2007, he realized that the company had the right idea, but it wasn’t solving enough of the problem.

“The original iteration was about taking the friction out of cross-border transactions by resolving currency-related issues,” he said.

After speaking with multiple retailers about the challenges they faced when trying to sell online in a foreign country, DeSimone realized the company needed to address the many complex issues involved with taking a business global, such as localizing a website to each country, navigating import and export restrictions, and understanding each country’s widely varying regulations.

Eventually, FiftyOne evolved into a much more sophisticated platform focused on tackling the intricate logistics of selling internationally.

U.S. retail is a hot commodity right now, DeSimone explained.

“People love to shop here. They love the selection, the competitiveness [between brands], the different styles a brand may adopt or reflect,” he said. “And in most cases, retailers are doing an excellent job of translating it to an online experience.”

Currently, FiftyOne’s country list hovers around 106, varying slightly more or less depending on how an area is defined (as a country or a territory), but the company is looking to expand its reach.

“We want to be able to say more than 200 [countries],” DeSimone said.

Japan, Kuwait, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, England, Turkey and Australia are just some of the countries that FiftyOne serves.

One of the company’s biggest challenges is the subjective nature of some of the importation rules and enforcement of those rules, DeSimone explained.

“In different countries, a lot is left up to the customs officer. A small silk shirt could be classified as a shirt, a women’s silk shirt, a child’s shirt [a child’s shirt isn’t charged tax]—and then the next time it’s called something else. That’s a big challenge.”

Other issues include not being able to import jewelry (including watches) into certain countries, how to implement duties based on how much a user has spent outside their home country, rural postal systems and verifying credit card information.

“I understand why the rules are the way they are, but from our standpoint, trying to make it a seamless experience is challenging,” DeSimone said.

Because online address verification (checking to make sure a billing address matches the address on record for the credit card) can be a challenge for customers outside of the United States and Canada, the company has become very adept at fraud management, he explained.

The company serves as the merchant of transaction, stepping in at the point of sale and catching all of the information from the consumer to process the payment. This serves to both manage fraud risk and allow the retailer to accept multiple payment options, including non-conventional ones, such as a country’s local credit card.

Once the order goes through, FiftyOne creates a domestic order that it sends to the retailer, so that the order goes through the retailer’s system as a U.S. transaction, and then the order is processed through a domestic “cross-dock” in Columbus, Ohio, and sent internationally.

Neiman Marcus, Saks, Guess, Macy’s, Gilt Groupe, David's Bridal and J. Crew are some of the companies that use FiftyOne for their international websites. The platform also integrates with Gilt Groupe’s mobile app and with David’s Bridal and J.Crew’s mobile websites.

The company changed its name from E4X to FiftyOne in 2009 and retained E4X as the brand for its foreign-exchange-only business. It divested E4X in 2011 and licensed the E4X name to Cambridge Mercantile Group, which is based in Toronto, Canada, with an additional office in Washington, D.C.

FiftyOne is looking to expand and recently purchased one of its competitors, Borderfree, in March. Borderfree was a business unit within the Canadian postal service that approached the company about joining them, DeSimone said.