So You Want To Sell Extended Warranties In Other Countries

You want to grow your warranty business by expanding into other countries outside of the USA. Are your warranty applications capable of processing warranty business outside the USA ? Chances are your applications are not capable of processing data in languages other then English and can't handle other currencies other then the USA Dollars.

The Basic Global Application Requirements

• Need to have DB support for single byte languages like English and double byte Asian languages like Simplified Chinese that has over 2500 characters.
• Need to expand all single bytes fields by doubling the size for example the last name field is 25 characters in the USA and wouldneed to be doubled to 50 characters to handle a double byte Asian language.
• Be able to support currencies with no decimal positions and support currencies that have more them 2 decimal positions.
• Validate all numeric data types to make sure they are sized big enough for currencies without decimal positions and for multiple decimal positions.
• Remove all hard coded labels on all screens. All labels need to be external and stored in a language cross reference table.
• Need to create a external language label cross reference table to cross reference labels from English to other languages.
• All user profiles should have a country field to store the country code of the user. This will be used to identify what language will be rendered for each users.

Things To Consider

• Does the transaction data need to reside in the country you are doing business in ? There are countries that require the data to reside on servers on their country soil where the business transaction happened.
• Need to consider if your application is multi tenant meaning all countries are in a single DB instance or should each country have their own unique DB instance.
• Need to consider where to host your application. Options to include USA, in each country, or in a region where the countries are close to each other.

In summary these are only some of the basic global application requirements to make your applications global to be used outside of the USA. This article does not consider other countries business requirements, regulation, compliance, or taxes,etc. Daniel Kozlowski President of DRK Resources Tech has architected and managed the development of multiple global warranty applications being used in North and South America, Asian, UK, and Europe. Please contact DRK Resources Tech to help to take your warranty applications global.