Tictail Digs Down Into The Swedish Market

Stockholm-based Tictail announced on Friday at the Nordic E-commerce Summit that they have launched their service in Swedish, releasing it in partnership with Loopia, Sweden’s largest web host. With the partnership, Loopia customers will get free access to custom domains, one of the areas Tictail started monetizing through ‘apps’ a few months ago.

While we’re on that topic, on top of the Custom Domain app, Tictail also offers Password protect, Klarna, Promo Codes and Dropped Carts. The company claims that 30% of their stores are using one or more custom apps, which is an important number for the company’s viability. Rather than charging sellers to open a store, or taking a cut of revenues, Tictail keeps those areas free and monetizes through these apps.

Tictail now claims over 14,000 active online stores in 98 countries, making this first step in localization an opportunity to dig down deeper and remove some friction in markets. Of those 14,000 stores, Tictail still sees Sweden as their largest market, making their service easier for customers who would prefer to go through their payment flows or build a store in Swedish. As they grow in Japan and other countries where it’s best to be localized, I imagine they will start releasing more languages soon.

“It’s great to finally have Tictail out in Swedish, it’s been the most requested feature for a long time amongst our Swedish stores,” says Carl Waldekranz, CEO of Tictail.

Perhaps it’s just observation bias, but compared to the rest of the Nordic and Baltic countries it feels like many Swedish startups first launch in Swedish, and then move on to English or other languages. Others, like Rabble (a B2C discount app), seem to be exclusively focused on the Swedish market, and don’t seem to be in any hurry to go more global.

I don’t know the exact reasons why Swedish entrepreneurs would choose to do so, but I think Swedish entrepreneurs would do well to follow in Tictail’s path of first looking at their product as global, and then honing down in their home market. 14,000 stores in just over a year isn’t bad.