AIMER streamlines international expansion with Avalara tax automation

Founded in 1993, AIMER is one of the leading lingerie brands in China. With over 20 years’ experience designing and creating high-end, luxury lingerie, AIMER boasts a creative design team that continuously develops more than 400 new products under its five main brands: AIMER, imi's, LA CLOVER, AIMER men, and Aimer Kids. Backed by this creative output, Aimer has built an international presence well beyond its home country, including in regions such as North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

Since migrating to Shopify Plus, AIMER has seen:

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Challenge

With international sales a key part of AIMER’s growth strategy, the company had sold its products directly to customers in North America via its own custom-built website since 2012. The brand wanted to lean further into its direct-to-consumer (DTC) overseas market opportunities. But it quickly became clear that the time and effort needed to tweak its existing site to suit shifting consumer preferences in North America and other regions made it difficult to keep up with the pace of change among target markets and evolving operational needs.

These challenges extended to adjustments and customizations needed to meet broader market settings in target regions. For instance, taxation had always been a major challenge in AIMER’s cross-border ecommerce operations, with the internal ecommerce team needing to manually set up tax rules for individual overseas markets. This issue was a major drain on company resources.

Solution

AIMER made the switch to Shopify Plus in March 2023 with the hope of gaining higher-level services and more customized solutions. Shopify Plus front-end customization capabilities enabled AIMER to make the changes needed to better suit the habits of overseas consumers in its target markets. Part of this customization was made possible by Shopify Markets Pro, which the brand used to give overseas customers two language options—English or Chinese— depending on their preferences.

At the same time, Shopify Plus's built-in Avalara tax automation feature helped AIMER automatically calculate tax costs based on the address of customers when selling in international markets. With this feature, Aimer no longer needed to manually set up tax rules for each country individually. Instead, Shopify Plus accurately calculated the tax for each order based on the latest tax rules of the target market and automatically added it to the final settlement page, making the actual tax cost clear to consumers.

Results

The customization options offered by Shopify Plus, including with the dual-language feature enabled by Shopify Markets Pro, have helped AIMER improve the customer experience in North America and other international markets. The brand has enjoyed more website visits, a rise in sales conversion rates, and an increase in the amount of time consumers spend on its international ecommerce website overall.

Moreover, the ability to automatically calculate tax rules and rates for each overseas market has reduced the amount of time and resources AIMER’s internal ecommerce team needs to spend on maintaining its international DTC site. This has increased operational efficiency for the brand, boosting the productivity of its international DTC business.

Looking ahead, AIMER has plans to leverage Shopify POS to realize the linkage of online and offline channels in the international market and better complete inventory management and order tracking across all channels.