Swap vs.  Global-e

The Global-e alternative you’ve been waiting for.

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Introduction

While most cross-border tools appear similar on the surface, the methods in which Swap and Global-e are structured are polar opposites.

Let’s unpack these differences one by one.

Swap’s Solution vs. Global-e Merchant of Record Solution

By working with Swap, your cash flow always remains on your side. Global-e operates using a Merchant of Record solution, meaning that they legally sell the product on your behalf through their checkout. This means they collect every dollar from your customers, subtract fees and logistics costs, and then pay you. This means your business loses valuable cash flow and margin due to its setup, which is required for all customers.

With Swap, you leverage your existing checkout, which leaves you with no questions asked and every dollar accounted for.

Pricing

Global-e’s Merchant of Record solution brings opacity to the overall relationship with the merchant. Merchant fees have ranged from 7 to 10 percent of total cart value, which, when you layer in the shipping costs of using their DHL accounts, may erode a significant amount of your margin. This is the polar opposite of how we enable our cross-border solution by leveraging your check-out. There’s no guessing and checking invoices — as we’ve seen with some merchants — you collect the cash, and we invoice you accordingly at the end of the month. Our pricing starts at 4 percent of cart value, in most cases, half of the Global-e fees.

Read the case study from Young Soles

Carrier & Warehouse Options

The restrictions don’t stop at the checkout. Global-e gives limited choices of carrier options, defaulting to DHL in most cases with limited room for negotiation. This could result in brands increasing logistics costs from where they currently are, further limiting the upside of cross-border growth. Moreover, if there are any issues with these orders, customers will run to the brands, but they won’t know that Global-e is the merchant in this case. This places an extra onus on your customer service to follow up with Global-e for any lost, stolen, or damaged packages, leaving you short on answers with customers while you wait for customer support to get back to you. At Swap, we allow for total carrier flexibility no matter the circumstances. Do you have a preferred carrier you’d like us to work with? That’s great. Do you want pre-negotiated, discounted rates with the best carriers in the world? We can make that happen.

Swap meets you where you are and aligns with you as a partner on where to go next.

On top of the carrier restrictions, Global-e will dictate where your warehouse will be. Meaning, since they are technically selling your product on your behalf to other markets, they are also choosing where your product will sell from using their warehouse. This could lead to more expensive logistics costs, and a more significant carbon footprint than is necessary. Swap allows you to leverage your existing warehouse network and 3PLs to maximize the efficiency of your existing setup. Swap can also connect you with local or regional 3PL partners in new markets to better regionalize your offering.

Separate Portals vs. One Master Portal

This issue has plagued ecommerce brands for years — segmenting portals for international versus domestic, or even worse, having multiple portals for various countries and a rest of world portal.

Global-e, for instance, puts tasks like providing a GE number onto the customer, instead of integrating with the brand’s confirmation page. This means more manual return steps, which can confuse and discourage shoppers from returning. Global-e further exacerbates this issue as they can only offer an international portal, meaning you’ll need at least Global-e and a domestic returns provider to work with them. This doubles the required investment for brands, if not more. Beyond that, Global-e’s portal is not the best in class UX compared to many available solutions.

Through one master portal, Swap can seamlessly integrate all your returns into one portal, improving the customer experience for your brand and reducing the queries from customers on how to process a return.

Duty Drawback

What is Duty Drawback, you ask? The refund of specific duties, internal revenue taxes, and certain fees collected upon the importation of goods and refunded when the merchandise is exported or destroyed. This means any duty, tax, or eligible fee (including merchandise processing fee) paid because of the importation of merchandise not used before exportation or destruction is recoverable as a drawback. With Swap, we handle global tax filing and duty drawbacks, handling country-specific tax and VAT requirements for all your international shipments.

Merchants save hundreds of thousands yearly thanks to the Swap’s ability to automatically file for duty drawbacks on return shipments using global tax IDs.

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Swap vs.  Global-e

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