When the world comes knocking: The unexpected signals you should go global

The 3 a.m. order from Melbourne. The TikTok comment asking whether you ship to São Paulo. The moment your customer service inbox fills with inquiries in four different languages. For many entrepreneurs, international expansion doesn't begin with plans of world domination. It begins with customers who refuse to let borders stop them.

This is the new reality. With the help of the right tools, nearly half (44%) of business owners make their first international sale within six months of starting operations.* The world moves faster than business plans, and the most reliable expansion signals often come from unexpected places.

When Yana Smaglo arrived in the UK as a refugee from Ukraine in 2022, she focused on modest goals: test products at local pop-ups, understand pricing. But after an interview with The Yorkshire Post, everything changed. Within four months, her company Nenya had 150 wholesale partners across three continents. 

“I wasn’t thinking about global business. I thought about the UK. But then my first clients were from the US, and they actually built my business,” she says. It was a market that found her, not the other way around.

The signals you can't ignore

For most entrepreneurs, international expansion means spreadsheets, market research, and five-year plans. The reality is it often arrives as organic demand that has nothing to do with revenue targets.

Paul Jauregui, co-founder of makeup brush brand BK Beauty, discovered this when launching more than five years ago. “We had already grown an audience on YouTube—there are no borders in that world. Within the first week, we were shipping to 65 countries.”

No MBA playbooks. Just packages heading to Germany because someone there fell in love with the brand’s concealer brushes.

And Ariana Hendry, co-founder of Australian personalized products company Beysis, knows this pattern well. Despite fulfilling everything from the brand’s Sydney warehouse—a deliberate choice to maintain quality control on customized products—orders flowed in from the US, UK, EU, and Singapore.

“Outside Australia, the US became our biggest market,” Ariana says. “Over in New Zealand, we’ve had wonderful growth, too.”

For lifestyle audio brand Skullcandy, one successful launch became the signal for the next. After going live with Shopify in the US, they quickly discovered they could replicate that success: Canada came online two weeks later, then EU and UK sites within another three weeks.

The most successful international expansions share a common thread: they begin with businesses solving problems for customers who already found them, not chasing customers who don't yet know they exist.

When your backyard gets too small

Sometimes international expansion comes not from external pull, but from bumping into your own ceiling. David Magee, director of product at World of Books, the UK-based online bookseller, says it plainly: “If our vision is to be the world's largest and most sustainable dedicated online bookstore, we can't do that just in the UK.”

He knew the US book market was eight times larger than the UK's. And he realized the brand would stagnate if it didn’t cross the pond. When David met people in the UK, most knew World of Books. The company had saturated its home market. Growth meant looking beyond familiar shores.

Today, 57% of businesses sell to international markets, reaching an average of 3.9 countries each*.

“The US is such a key market for us. We don't have the language barriers and cultural barriers that we might have in other large markets,” David says.

So World of Books acquired a US competitor, gaining not just warehouse space but permission to dream bigger. “We're not shipping books across the Atlantic, which means we can price more competitively and be faster.”

The fear and the thrill

When a merchant decides to go global, it’s equal parts terror and exhilaration. The challenges are real: 42% of businesses cite shipping and delivery as their biggest international obstacle, while 33% struggle with building customer trust across borders.* 

Ariana captures this duality perfectly. After successfully testing in California, she was excited about growing in that market. But uncertainty around changing trade policies forced her team toslam on the brakes.

“The uncertainty is the greatest challenge because you don't want to make hard and fast decisions given the constantly shifting landscape,” Ariana says. The team made the painful decision to kill their U.S. marketing overnight.

But they didn't retreat—they pivoted: “We're exploring other options. We're in discussions with a retail distributor in the EU, trying to diversify our risk so we don't put all our eggs in one basket.”

For Yana, doubling down international expansion wasn't optional—it was survival. When trade restrictions impacted her US order volume, she didn’t give up either. She began exploring new markets in the Middle East.

Their responses reveal a crucial mindset: seeing obstacles as redirection rather than roadblocks.

When infrastructure meets ambition

The difference between seeing signals and acting on them sometimes comes down to infrastructure. 

“Shopify has always been good about laying the train tracks ahead of us right when we're ready to take that next push,” says Paul from BK Beauty, who turned to Shopify Markets for the brand’s international expansion.

World of Books now sells across 190 countries and ships in seven different markets. His brand was one of the first to deploy Shopify Markets. “We've shipped more features and changes to improve customer experience in the last three months than in the previous five years on our old platform,” says David.

And Skullcandy discovered the importance of having the right tools when the brand launched a single product across four regions in seven weeks. Their new infrastructure finally matched their vision.

“It used to take us an entire day to launch a single product across our regions,” says Jenny Buchar, the brand’s director of global digital experience. “That's now condensed down to one hour complete with quality assurance so that we can move on to the next region.”

The new reality of global commerce

For Beysis, being forced to abandon the US market could have been devastating. Instead, it clarified the brand’s real advantage.“We are a niche business with niche appeal,” Ariana says. “So the amount of penetration we need to grow can be found anywhere.”

The optimism is warranted. The infrastructure exists, the demand is global, and the barriers that once made international expansion a luxury for large corporations have largely disappeared.

Whether you’re massive or niche, the question isn't whether global opportunities will find you. It's whether you'll be ready when they do.

*Survey conducted by The Harris Poll from August 22nd to 31st, 2025 on behalf of Shopify.