Australian-born luxury etailer Cettire has cited emerging markets as the next phase of its growth strategy, now comprising a quarter of total revenue.
CFO Tim Hume confirmed the increased market share is a 10% surge on 18 months prior.
“I choose 18 months because that was around the time that we launched our proprietary storefront software,” Hume said.
The technology will enable Cettire to capitalise on 50 markets outside its top three destinations - the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The US market makes up 60% of total revenue, with Australia making up around 10%.
The software deploys localised websites, adding new languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish as well as expanding currencies.
Hume said while China is the largest luxury market in the world, the company is currently not present on mainland channels.
“The key point on the Chinese side, though, is we're not actually operating within mainland China as it stands. But Chinese language capability is an important capability that you need in order to operate in the Chinese market, which is something on the horizon for us.”
Hume said the return on investment will be noted over the next few years as it plans to scale the market. In the meantime, he said the Chinese-speaking population outside of China is already making use of its language accessibility.
“We continue to see good volumes through our existing markets from those who are transacting in the Chinese language,” Hume said. “However, the Chinese language is just one of the localisation features that we're working on.
“We're working on many different languages other than English. We've just launched Japanese/Korean in the last few weeks. We recently bought Spanish as well, which opens up a huge pool of demand in Latin America.
“And language is just one feature of localisation.”
Over time, Cettire will expand the currencies it accepts, as well as payment methods.
“Generally, this is going to be supportive of conversion in markets outside of our top three, and will be really constructive in terms of laying the foundation for growth and penetration in all those markets where we're really coming from a very low base.
“With the deployment of these localisation features, growing penetration outside the top three markets provides another layer to the growth trajectory and is one of the key reasons we're feeling pretty confident right now.”