I received lots of great feedback on our Bundle Tech site. There was excitement about the problems we are trying to solve, there were compliments on the design of the site and words of encouragement on starting a business in this environment. And then there was the question: Cross-border commerce, who is into that? Why didn’t you do something in social networks, those are hot, everyone is into social networks!

Well, lets have a look at how many people are into cross-border ecommerce.

My best guess is to start with eBay. The last official data I can find on eBay cross-border trade is from 2005, where eBay reports that 15% of their transactions are cross border. Applying that to today’s GMV, this would mean a cross-border trade on eBay of around $9B. Assuming eBay represents a third of total cross-border ecommerce this would mean that the total market size for cross-border ecommerce is around $27B.

If we take an average transaction value of $150, the $27B would translate into around 182 million transactions per year. If we assume that on average people buy 2.5 items a year from abroad, this would mean that around 72 million people are ‘into’ cross-border ecommerce. A bit less than the number of people that are into Facebook et al, but still a sizable amount. They will work at it a bit less than the 25.4 min/day that the average Facebooker is spending on Facebook, but still.

72 million people buying something from a website in another country, does that sound about right to you? Let me know if you have any comments.

Catch you later

Andre