International trade can be just a click away

Editor’s note: Michelle Stockman is an independent consultant with her company, Fort Smith-based Msaada Group. Stockman earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University-Chicago in communications and fine arts, and earned a master’s in entrepreneurship from Western Carolina University. Her thoughts on business success appear each week on The City Wire.

Did you know there is a new way to engage in world trade that will save you time from hunting down the right companies to do business oversees while saving the expense of traveling around the world? It is another opportunity to support Thomas Friedman’s theory that the world is flat. Best of all, it is an Arkansas company that is leveling the playing field.

Until now, if an entrepreneur wanted to get involved in doing business with a company in another country, the process often became cumbersome. Once the product to import or export was determined, the small business owner needed to find the connections in the desired country.

Resources like the World Trade Organization, local World Trade Centers, finding the right contact in the country’s consulate office or searching the internet made that possible. Inevitably, a representative from the small business would need to spend the time finding the right foreign company to engage in business (which most often required expensive travel).

Once a working relationship was executed, the small business needed to coordinate import/export logistics that also included domestic logistics to get products to port or the business warehouse. In addition to logistics, details about customs, tariffs and trade agreements circle around the entrepreneurs mind.

After the agreements and import/export details are worked out, all the entrepreneur has to do is wonder about the shipment, government unrest, piracy and possible containment of product by customs on either side. Some of those issues may sound extreme, but they do happen and business owners should plan for risk contingency if something goes wrong in the international trade experience.

There is a way to reduce the risk of conducting world trade, at least on the front end. Taste of the World, an Arkansas-based company, has developed a new global trade system that utilizes the online power of social networking to erase the distance in connecting buyers and sellers. This system decreases the expense of connecting to a global market while increasing the efficiencies of conducting global business through connecting pre-qualified retail products to screened retail buyers through the use of technology.

Taste of the World has successfully launched their new retail purchasing software, “TradeCompressor” that has captured the attention of several major businesses and leading retail merchants. This software is used in 18 countries and counting. Additionally, a broad spectrum of large and small businesses are involved both in buyer and seller positions. This solution asks users to fill in a questionnaire that allows the system to find the business matches that are needed, ending the significant amount of time businesses spend in finding each other.

Tools such as “TradeCompressor” allow the world an opportunity to improve one of the oldest traditions known to man as international trade. Web applications such as this along with video conferencing are making the world flat and accessible even to the smallest business.

Who knew an Arkansas company has started changing the world?. You can learn more about Taste of the World’s TradeCompressor web enabled software through a webinar being hosted later in August.

As Fort Smith welcomes companies such as Mitsubishi and Umarex as well as Baldor’s new ownership from abroad, we see that business continues to erase political borders in order to grow. Now, entrepreneurs are gaining the tools necessary to cross borders too. From exporting snow boards to importing micro chips, international trade is no longer reserved for the Fortune 1000 anymore.

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Stockman can be reached at [email protected]