A little over half of ActionVFX orders come from the United States.
That sounds normal until you look at the traffic. More than 80% of our web traffic comes from outside the US, which means roughly 20% of visitors account for over half of our orders and more than 75% of our top-line revenue.
That bugged me.
Are visual effects assets less useful outside the United States? I doubt it. Artists in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines, and plenty of other countries still need explosions, fire, smoke, debris, rain, dust, muzzle flashes, and background plates.
The more likely answer is price. Our products are priced in US dollars, mostly around US buying power, and that price can get painful fast once currency conversion and local wages enter the picture.
So that became the thesis:
if we reduce pricing in underserved regions, conversion rate should go up enough to make the experiment worth it.
The wrong move would have been turning that into a giant international pricing project. Regional pricing, local currencies, local payment methods, subscription changes, automatic price testing, localized landing pages, and a launch across every country at once.
Maybe a huge company can spend that much brainspace. We shouldn’t.
We started smaller.
First, we built a basic regional discounting system for a few countries, mainly India and Indonesia. GeoIP lookup, decide whether the visitor qualifies, show the correct price, and make sure checkout honors it. That first month added roughly 30–40 orders, mostly from India, which was enough signal to keep going.
Then we expanded the list and repeated the same approach. Vietnam and Mexico stood out as clearly underserved markets. Across the countries with localized pricing, we’re now around 100 additional incremental orders post-launch.
Local payment methods
We also tried local payment methods: WeChat Pay, UPI in India, and a few others that sound obvious when you talk about international growth. Full disclosure: I’ve seen basically zero value from that so far. Maybe we haven’t pushed it hard enough. Maybe the product category doesn’t need it. Maybe the friction is somewhere else. China also deserves its own post, because selling there involves a pile of hurdles that go way beyond adding a payment method. For now, I’m not putting much more energy into local payment methods until the data gives me a reason.
Local currency is the next piece
Local currency is the next piece. We’re still working on showing localized currency on product landing pages, in Stripe presentment, and through checkout. My Stripe rep told me their data suggests local currency can increase conversion by around 12%. I’m curious whether that holds for us, but I’m not treating it as real until we see it in our own numbers.
Still much room for improvement
The scrappy version has tradeoffs. We haven’t touched subscriptions yet. We don’t have fully automated price experiments. We haven’t rolled it out to every country that might deserve it. We didn’t launch with local currencies. We didn’t build the perfect international pricing engine.
We shipped the smallest version that could prove or disprove the idea.
The results (tl;dr)
Before this, about 2% of our orders came from the countries where we now have localized pricing. That number is now around 8%.
That’s why I like this kind of project. You don’t need a year-long international growth plan to start. Look at the mismatch, make a reasonable bet, ship the smallest version, and watch the numbers.
If 80% of your visitors are outside your strongest revenue market, don’t assume they’re bad traffic. Your product may just not be at a feasible price point for the average user after currency conversion.