2 websites same company- different countries. How to set up?

Question

My friend is selling his niche product in the US, and myself will do the same here in Australia. We will have 2 websites almost identical and we are thinking of linking to each other on our websites, so that people from the US will buy from him and people from Australia will buy from me. (Much quicker delivery, and less expensive shipping price.)

We are thinking of keeping one social media (his has been running for 3 yrs) and marketing and interacting with our target in both countries.

How do you redirect customers to the right website? For example on Facebook how do you manage to send customers in the correct country website? Is there any settings that will allow this?

Or is it better to just link each other, hence having 2 different Facebook pages? If this will make a difference: his shop is on shopify, mine woocommerce.

Answer 1

You got few things to consider.

Firstly, website and social are 2 different issues.

Website

If you are going with 2 different website model that's fine but worth considering following points:

• If you are planning to cross link then make sure those links are 'nofollow', just to avoid any issues.
• If you are having an identical website then that's fine but make sure content is not the same, the content should be unique and targeted to respective countries.
• Even I would say you should consider having unique (content) product pages.

Note: If the product, target audience and business planning would be similar then you may consider having one website and redirect to the respective country page. But here effective planning would be very important and may not be an easy task. But you can use the same model to expand to other countries if need to be.

Social

Generally what I have noticed is, it's better to have separate social accounts for different countries and there are so many reasons as why.

• Generally, people don't like to see feed which is not for them (US vs AU).

• It will be a lot easier to build and organic social posts for respective countries.

• Billing and several other things would be a lot easier.

Conclusion: You can think about planning website in many different ways but worth considering the linking strategy and content uniqueness. Social definitely should be separate.