The playbook doesn't travel, the diagnosis does

Plenty of people have put a universal growth playbook on their Christmas list. But reality looks right back at you: we work across markets that tolerate different frictions, and mistaking that for good or bad practice creates structural errors.

A useful compass is Geert Hofstede's theory of cultural dimensions, especially "uncertainty avoidance": how much ambiguity a culture tolerates before it feels at risk. Applied to eCommerce, it defines which friction your customer forgives and which one makes them abandon the cart.

In Spain, the friction that is least forgiven is the gap between what was promised and what was delivered. It's a mature market with high regulatory demands, where the message has to hold up the same way on the landing page, at checkout and in the product that arrives at the door. You don't compete on creativity there, you compete on compliance.

In Georgia, the friction changes: the lack of localization. Without a mature D2C ecosystem as a local reference, every decision on language, currency, payment method and even tone of voice had to be built from scratch, because no market standard took anything for granted.

In Argentina, the friction belongs to another family altogether: price and financing. With inflation deeply internalized, the idea that "paying in fixed installments today means paying less in real terms tomorrow" got burned into people's heads. The conversion driver is neither the message nor localization, it's the financial structure of the purchase.

The same product can convert for completely opposite reasons depending on the country where you sell it. And the pattern shows up in ways anyone selling in more than one market will recognize: countries where a slightly slower website scares nobody, and others where you get punished for exactly that. Markets where charging for shipping doesn't break conversion, and others where that extra charge at checkout is a direct cause of abandonment.

There isn't one single mistake, there's one single way of always making it: taking the variable that solved growth in one market and assuming it will solve it in the next. At the end of the day, the playbook doesn't travel, the diagnosis does.