HomeWizard overcomes the complexities of international growth with Mollie and Woo

Founded in 2011, HomeWizard is a Dutch business that helps homes across Europe track and optimize their energy consumption. They initially set out to create everyday smart home products and appliances, but pivoted in 2021 to focus on accessible energy monitoring and a D2C business model.

Today, their flagship product, the P1 Meter, gives customers real-time insight into their homes’ energy consumption through the free-to-use HomeWizard app. 

The business distributes to 28 countries across Europe, and maintains 11 localized websites to serve their biggest markets. Growing into this expansive market didn’t come without hurdles, however: coordinating compatibility and distribution across a wide range of countries and currencies is an ongoing job to be done. 

We recently sat down with Maurice van Wieringen from HomeWizard, alongside the team at Mollie, to learn more about how HomeWizard manages payments from 28 different countries (and counting).

• Entire business model is direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce.
• Expanded to 28 countries in less than two years.
• Maintains 11 localized sites, including localized payment methods.

HomeWizard was able to grow quickly after their D2C pivot because of the ability to quickly launch in new markets, thanks in part to WooCommerce and Mollie. 

“We used a broad growth approach to cast a wide net across Europe. We tested market-fit by rapidly launching, analyzing, and optimizing — then seeing what sticks. We needed our systems to be flexible enough to support that.”

— Maurice van Wieringen, Head of Marketing, HomeWizard

These flexible systems allowed the team to bring their English-language website to any new country and make that country’s most popular payment methods available through Mollie.

They would then assess which countries saw the most success, and invest further in those locations with localized site development and marketing.

For HomeWizard, international expansion depends heavily on ensuring compatibility between the P1 Meter and a country’s standard digital smart meter. After that, the challenges are much easier: “Together with WooCommerce, it’s just checking boxes for where we ship to,” van Wieringen said. “Then Mollie makes it easy to collect payments in new countries.”

HomeWizard initially launched the P1 Meter in the Netherlands, and then expanded to Belgium. When they found that they were receiving site traffic and interest from other markets, they launched an English-language website to make their business more broadly accessible and track exactly where that interest was coming from. 

As they’ve grown, HomeWizard has maintained their customer-focused philosophy: their product should be affordable and accessible for everyone. They’ve held the same principle for their website, gradually building localized sites for each of their key markets.

Their WooCommerce store currently has 11 regional languages, which has enabled HomeWizard to best serve the largest audiences for their products. Beyond these 11 locales, HomeWizard ships to an additional 17 countries and continues to grow.

In addition to language localization for their 11 stores, HomeWizard also displays prices in local currencies and offers nationally preferred payment methods — a detail that’s helped them grow quickly in new markets. 

Only some of their distribution locations use the Euro, but Mollie makes it easy to enable those customers to pay in their local currency. When customers land on homewizard.com, prices are automatically converted based on the customer’s location, regardless of whether their browser selects one of the 11 localized sites, or the English-by-default site. 

“When it comes to payments, it’s pretty boring… which is great!” van Wieringen joked. Their payment pages look the same for every customer, and Mollie allows the HomeWizard team to easily select which payment methods are available for each location. 

“The combination of WooCommerce and Mollie works well for us because they’re easy to use. It’s not a hassle to launch in a new country.”

— Maurice van Wieringen, Head of Marketing, HomeWizard

HomeWizard’s success over the years has been impressive, and they’re not done yet. With a rapidly growing team and user base, they’re able to manage their website and product in-house in the Netherlands.

Having recently launched a new product in the Netherlands and Belgium, HomeWizard is both focusing on product line and geographic expansion — and new localized sites are always on the horizon. Van Wieringen assured us that he’s confident in their tech stack: “The boxes for payments are already checked, of course, [with Mollie].”  

While they’re continuing research and development, their focus remains the same: ensuring their products are accessible for as many households (and people) as possible.

About

Vanessa Petersen

Vanessa has spent her career writing helpful things for people across the tech space. Outside of work, she enjoys training for triathlon, rotating through hobbies, and exploring new places both urban and natural. She has two fluffy cats, maintains a few succulents, and has far too many books on her TBR shelf.