
Expanding your ecommerce business into global markets can backfire if you don’t master ecommerce localization. For example, if you run an ecommerce business based out of the US and want to expand into Japan and China, then you need to localize your site to succeed in those target markets and increase your conversion rates. After all, 40% of consumers won’t buy in other languages—so when they see that they can’t understand what’s on your site, they’ll likely exit out.
To avoid this, it means you need to:
Localizing your ecommerce site is a significant project, covering everything from translation to delivery logistics. There’s a good chance you’ll need to use a design and development team for some of these steps. But the good news is that translation, the first step of localization, can be handled within minutes.
But first, let’s take a look at what ecommerce localization is.
Ecommerce localization is when you modify your online store’s content—that includes your product names, descriptions, checkout page, blogs, and even payment options—to fit the context of your different markets. That means you’ll localize your online business per target market.
The goal of ecommerce localization is to make the online shopping experience more natural for your customers. If you’re hoping to target European and Latin American customers who speak Spanish, it wouldn’t make sense to have one Spanish website catering to them both since they’re in different countries. Instead, it would make more sense for your localization strategy—and the customer experience you’ll offer—to localize your store for each audience.
Adapting your ecommerce store to your local markets offers many advantages, such as:
The more time customers take before deciding on a purchase, the more likely they’ll abandon their cart. Factors that contribute to this: not knowing the total cost right away through hidden fees or needing to convert to their local currency, or seeing that extra costs (such as customs and duties) were too expensive for them. Localize your ecommerce store by adding prices in your audience’s respective currencies.
An ecommerce localization strategy means tailoring your existing ecommerce store to specific audiences. As search engines prioritize the most relevant content when presenting results to users, that means they’ll more likely rank your website higher since it’s been modified to suit the context of that specific demographic.
Ecommerce localization involves deep market research to understand a demographic’s context. So when a customer lands on a website that is clearly tailored to them, they’ll believe that you have taken great care to research their needs and preferences. Thus, you are the business that will offer the ideal solution to their problems.
Localizing your ecommerce store means removing many barriers to purchasing: offering information in their content, displaying prices in their currency, streamlining the checkout process, and proving to your customers that you truly understand them. And when those barriers are gone, your visitors will engage with you more easily—leading to improved conversion rates.
To help you localize your ecommerce business successfully across the local language, logistical, and cultural barriers of expanding into a new market, we’ll take a look at three important steps.
The first step of the localization process is translating your ecommerce website into its new language. And the fastest and most effective way to do this is using website translation software that offers machine and human translations.
That’s what The Bradery did when they decided to choose Weglot to serve their international customers better.
The Bradery is a French ecommerce brand that wanted to keep quality brands and young designers accessible to customers in a sustainable, affordable way. They do this by partnering with specially chosen brands and selling overproduced items through daily flash sales. That way, they’d help minimize clothes that end up in the landfill.
However, they have more than 500 products uploaded daily to their site, and translating each of those into both English and Spanish by themselves proved to be too tedious and time-consuming.
Thanks to Weglot, The Bradery was able to enjoy a hands-off translation and localization process, even with 500+ new product information and descriptions and pages to manage each day. They even tested Dutch and Italian on their website to see the feasibility of catering to more international markets, made possible by Weglot’s flexibility and support for over 110 languages.
Weglot uses advanced neural machine translation from leading MT providers that automatically translate your site, allowing you to instantly provide a better user experience for your new audiences. Neural machine translation (NMT) works off advanced algorithms that “learn” about the language as it’s translating it. That means it’s consistently learning the most accurate and natural way to translate words and phrases.
With Weglot, you can:
Localization isn’t just about translating your content, but making sure your website is well received in its new market. One way of doing this is optimizing your translated sites for search engines, so when someone in your new market is looking for a product you offer, they find your translated website and not your competitors.
Weglot helps with your translated site’s SEO in three ways.
Weglot’s easy-to-use website translation software can translate your entire site within minutes. Weglot helps with your ecommerce localization by making sure your translated sites are optimized for search engines.
Localizing your checkout experience is just as important as translating your site into your global audience’s own languages. If your checkout experience isn’t fully localized, more of your target audience will abandon their cart—even if they really do want to buy your product.
This could be because they don’t understand how expensive a product is, or because they can’t accurately fill out the required form fields.
Below, we cover:
An important part of your localization efforts is to make sure you’re offering the right payment options that are most popular in your respective foreign markets.
For example, in Germany, PayPal is a popular payment method for ecommerce sites. But the most popular method in Germany is the open invoice—where payment is issued after delivery. If you’re a US-based company, this is practically unheard of. But if you’re looking to grow in Germany, then it’s worth looking at how to adopt this option on your site.
Meanwhile, in South Korea, the major merchants (Visa, AMEX, and Mastercard) are the most popular. Yet there are also dozens of other online businesses—some specific to South Korea—like BC Card and Lotte Card which are also very popular and could be worth having on your site to increase conversions.
If you do your ecommerce localization correctly, you won’t need your customer to do any work on their end to understand your product, service, or prices. This means making sure that your prices are updated to reflect the local currency.
For example, if you’re an ecommerce store based in France—a Eurozone country—then you’re going to want to convert your prices to dollars when localizing for the United States.
When someone from the US sees a price listed as €30, they’re not going to be completely confident with how much that is in their currency. This can lead to them abandoning their cart or opening a new tab to figure out the price, which is a less-than-ideal checkout practice.
Here are some links to help you localize your currency (based on popular ecommerce platforms/CMS tools):
If you’re not running your ecommerce on a platform with ready-made solutions for switching currency, then you can ask a developer to create one for your ecommerce store.
The form field at the checkout is going to be different from country to country. And without the right address forms, users will quickly bounce off your site.
For example, if you’re a US-based ecommerce company expanding into the UK, then you need to have a form that UK users can fill out. In the US, telephone numbers follow this format: xxx-xxx-xxxx. But in the UK, they follow this format: xxx-xxxx-xxxx.
There are also huge variations in how countries handle their addresses. In Japan, for example, it’s more common that streets don’t have names. Instead, cities are organized into blocks.
Many of the leading ecommerce platforms will automatically switch up your address forms at checkout to match the country you’re shipping to. Weglot can translate all the text on your site, so you don’t have to worry about the language of your forms.
The next step of localization is making sure your brand image and marketing materials are tailored toward your audience.
This is something you should focus on after you’ve translated your site and localized your checkout experience (which are higher priority items).
But you also shouldn’t skip over this part—and remember it might be more important in some parts of the world than others. For example, there may be more cultural differences between the US and Japan than between the US and Canada.
When looking to localize your content, you want to focus on:
The whole idea of localization is that your new customer doesn’t feel like your site is out of place or “foreign” at all—it should be tailored to them. It might be a matter of altering product shot backgrounds, or making sure models are representative of your target demographic in any given location.
Above, we covered three steps to mastering ecommerce localization:
Some of these are more time-consuming than others. For example, marketing strategy localization involves design, copywriting, and branding projects. None of which are quick.
But the good news is that Weglot can help you get a fully-translated ecommerce site within minutes that’s optimized for local search engines.
Weglot is a fast and accurate website translation software that works with any website. It can translate your site’s native language into over 110 different languages.
Weglot uses two methods, which give you as much (or as little) hands-on involvement as you want.
Discover how simple Weglot is with our interactive demo, or see it live on your website with our 10-day trial.