It’s uncomfortable walking into a shop where the signs are in a language you don’t understand and no one speaks your language.
It’s the same when browsing products online. Customers won’t feel welcome and, likely, they won’t stick around (let alone buy something).
To grow your international ecommerce business, you always have to think about the person sitting on the other side of the screen. Speaking their language is the bare minimum, but there’s a lot more to it.
In this article, you’ll learn how multilingual content fuels the growth of your international ecommerce store, sometimes in unexpected ways. You’ll also get easy-to-follow tips on how to handle ecommerce website translation, with a special offer at the end.
📚Expert tips inside
Read the entire article to discover expert translation tips. We’ll share insights from Aaron Presley, Technical Lead at Siemens, Jenn Alvin, Localization UX consultant with a decade-worth of experience working with the global Nike e-commerce team, and Ella Brand, Staff Technical Project Manager at Lattice.
Every single customer that lands on your ecommerce website should enjoy their shopping experience, regardless of their location and language preferences.
In that sense, ecommerce translation and localization is the first step to personalization at scale. It’s a prerequisite for building great customer experiences. When global customers genuinely enjoy interacting with your website, it triggers a positive chain reaction.
Your online customers feel more comfortable and confident when they navigate your website intuitively. Not only that, but they expect to be able to read product descriptions and policies in their own language.
When thinking about building pleasant online experiences for your international customers, you need to cover ease of navigation, textual content, and design. Below, you can find useful questions that can help you evaluate how well your ecommerce website meets the needs of different markets.
💡 Pro tip
Financial translations are important, and so is localization. However, currencies can get complicated, so make sure you localize only the currency you know. For example, if you’re based in the US and UK and primarily support only those currencies, then you should stick to that.
Aaron Presley, Technical Lead at Siemens, shared how it’s better to leave exchange rates and all the conversions to your payment provider, and let them do the hard work:
“Localize currency, but don’t convert it. Let’s say that you sell a product that costs $100. Imagine you have a Japanese customer. You want to display your product in the proper currency to them.It’s important to know that language is not a location. Just because the user prefers buying in Japanese doesn’t mean that they are in Japan. Even if they were, the price is still in US dollars, even if you want to display it in Japanese locale. Japan is the example I use because they have really complicated tax laws.”
With globalization, buying products is incredibly easy and available within a click of a button. It’s estimated that there are over 26 million ecommerce websites out there, which means two things:
When you make your international ecommerce store available in target languages and think about adjusting the experience to different locales, you build a rapport with global customers from the get-go. The more your customers feel seen and heard, the better they’ll feel about your brand.
Nowadays, people expect personalized interactions, instant gratification, and a smooth browsing experience. The extent to which you decide to localize your website will make a difference between building an average experience and a stellar one.
If you truly adopt the customer-first approach, you will positively impact sales and gain a competitive edge. Let’s take a look at reverse seasonality to better understand how multilingual content and localization play a crucial role in your go-to-market strategy.
Reverse seasonality refers to the practice of adjusting your international ecommerce business's marketing, inventory, and promotional strategies to account for the opposite seasonal patterns in different parts of the world. This is especially important if you operate in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, where seasons occur at opposite times of the year.
Let’s say you’re an online fashion retailer that sells clothing in both the US (Northern Hemisphere) and Australia (Southern Hemisphere). In December, it’s winter in the US, so you’ll promote winter coats, scarves, and boots.
Simultaneously, in Australia, it's summer. This means that the localized ecommerce store for Australia and your marketing campaigns will focus on swimsuits, sunglasses, and beachwear.
The result? Higher market penetration, better customer experiences, and maximized revenue all-year-round.
💡Pro tip
Even when you’re dealing with a single language, marketing can be tricky. The best way to ensure success is to stay light on your feet, continuously collect insights about your customers’ behavior, and iterate.Not sure if the translated copy will resonate? Consider doing variant testing to determine what performs better in the target market.
Whenever you expand to new markets, you face the challenge of competing with brands that have been there for years. Not only will you have to invest in marketing activities and let people know you exist, but you’ll also have to earn people’s attention and trust.
Moreover, if you have direct competitors, you’ll need to give a strong reason to your target market to leave the brands they might have been loyal to. It’s possible to do that by crafting a compelling offer and communicating in a way that resonates. This is exactly where multilingual content fits in.
There are two main reasons why your international ecommerce needs multilingual content to build brand awareness:
The thing is, we are emotionally more receptive to messages in our native tongue because language is deeply intertwined with our identity, emotions, and cognitive processes. When we recognize that the content is relevant for us, we’re able to receive the message, loud and clear. The context makes sense, and we’re open to interacting with the website.
As we previously mentioned, when potential customers visit your ecommerce website, they expect a smooth experience. From a business perspective, building this frictionless experience leads to more sales.
Apart from the technical functionality of your website, you need to make the content available in different languages to make buying online easier. Here’s why:
We might not be aware of it, but messages delivered in our native tongue tap into deep-seated cognitive, cultural, and emotional pathways. This is why we might get fond of brands that make us feel like we belong.
❗Important note
Context is critical for accurate translations. No company is immune to translation mistakes that happen because of the lack of context. Here’s what Jenn Alvin, Localization UX consultant, shared on the topic:
“Context is key. At Nike, when we were getting ready to launch in China, thousands of strings were sent out for translations without context. The results were so egregious that I was sent to China with a three-day notice, including securing my visa. I spent a week with a linguist and a business operations manager so that I could explain the context and the appropriate translations could be used.”
Now that we covered the main reasons why every international ecommerce needs to prioritize translation and localization, let’s take a look at how AI can help.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you must have noticed that AI is everywhere, translation industry included. There’s still a lot of skepticism around it, especially in the context of disrupting the job market and the questionable quality of translations.
If you’re just getting started with setting up your international ecommerce, and you want to make it accessible to global customers, you have to know one thing:
You have a great head start thanks to AI.
This is not an exaggeration. Many still think of AI as clunky, serving up inaccurate word-for-word translations. That’s far from the truth.
As a neural machine translation service, Google Translate has evolved itself, while DeepL has grown to become one of the more respected machine translation tools in the industry.
AI technology has pushed the limits of what’s possible – not just for speedy translations, but for automating entire workflows.
Here’s what Ella Brand, Staff Technical Project Manager at Lattice, and one of the very first beta users of Lokalise AI, had to say:
“When we reviewed translations provided by human translators, the results were a bit underwhelming. AI was able to better understand the context and the lingo of the industry. For me, a fantastic translator needs to have a good understanding of the HR space, and how software is coded. All of that together is kind of rare to find. And probably super expensive, to be honest.”
AI has become more sophisticated (and more accurate) than you probably think. For example, Lokalise AI allows you to upload your style guide for contextual and on-brand translations.
💡Pro tip
Here’s what Ella Brand, Staff Technical Project Manager at Lattice, had to say on the value of AI and working within a single platform:
“Probably the biggest benefit of using AI in translation is decreasing the time-to-market. It’s not that human translators are necessarily slower, but there’s a lot of back and forth. [...] One fundamental thing that can really make a difference when it comes to your localization and international strategy, is if you combine your go-to-market efforts with engineering efforts in one centralized system.”
Lokalise is a localization platform that helps you manage translations, as well as translate your store with AI – all in one place.
Author
Mia has 13+ years of experience in content & growth marketing in B2B SaaS. During her career, she has carried out brand awareness campaigns, led product launches and industry-specific campaigns, and conducted and documented demand generation experiments. She spent years working in the localization and translation industry.
In 2021 & 2024, Mia was selected as one of the judges for the INMA Global Media Awards thanks to her experience in native advertising. She also works as a mentor on GrowthMentor, a learning platform that gathers the world's top 3% of startup and marketing mentors.
Earning a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature helped Mia understand stories and humans better, think unconventionally, and become a really good, one-of-a-kind marketer. In her free time, she loves studying art, reading, travelling, and writing. She is currently finding her way in the EdTech industry.
Mia’s work has been published on Adweek, Forbes, The Next Web, What's New in Publishing, Publishing Executive, State of Digital Publishing, Instrumentl, Netokracija, Lokalise, Pleo.io, and other websites.
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