Shopify multi-language guide: How to translate your store

Do you want to expand your store’s reach and sell internationally?

You could offer international shipping to customers and let anyone from almost anywhere in the world buy your products. But why stop there?

Emulate the big brands and create a multi-language Shopify store instead. 

According to Shopify, brands see an average 13% increase in conversion rates when translating stores into different languages. Your online store could also see a spike in organic traffic from showing up in international versions of popular search engines. 

In other words, it pays to translate the whole of your Shopify store. And today, we’re going to show you how. 

In this article, we cover four ways to make your Shopify store multi-lingual, five best practices you should follow, and the three most common mistakes to avoid. 

How to get a multi-language Shopify store

A multi-language Shopify store lets shoppers view your content in their native language. There are five strategies you can use to translate your Shopify store: 

1. Use Shopify Markets

The first option store owners tend to consider when making their Shopify store multilingual is to use the platform’s native cross-border management tool, Shopify Markets. 

Shopify Markets centralizes the process of creating and managing international selling. Sounds great, right?

Well, you’ll need to meet a few requirements first, including:

• A Basic Shopify plan or higher
• A compatible theme that allows you to sell in different languages
• A theme that comes with a language selector
• The Shopify Translate & Adapt app or a third-party translation app

Even if you meet those requirements, you’ll still need to provide manual translations if you want to target more than two languages. Oh, and you can’t localize your URLs or any tags (product tags, blog tags, etc.). 

The translation quality of Shopify Translate & Adapt isn’t as good as some other options out there either. 

If you’re after quality, then AI-powered translation tools with advanced features are the way to go. Think multiple AI engines that give you the best translations, the option to upload your glossary and style guide, and direct access to human translators. 

So, while Shopify’s native solution may seem easy enough, you quickly run into problems if you want to scale international sales. 

2. Choose a multi-lingual theme

Several “multi-lingual” themes exist that promise to turn your single-language operation into a multi-lingual store. In fact, some shop owners believe that is all they need to translate their store content into different languages. 

While these themes seem like the ideal solution on the surface, there’s more to a multilingual Shopify experience than translating your home and product pages. For example, these themes don’t always let you translate your back-end shopping experience — like your checkout page or system messages.

Even if you find a theme that does let you translate everything, you’ll still need to source accurate translations yourself. That won’t cost an unreasonable amount if you only want to target one other language, but it doesn’t scale well. 

3. Create multiple Shopify stores for each native language

One way to create a multi-lingual Shopify experience is by not creating a multi-lingual website at all. Instead, you can create a new store for every international market you wish to enter. 

You won’t have to deal with the perceived hassle of finding a multi-language solution to Shopify using this approach, but it creates just as many problems as it solves. 

It’s incredibly time-consuming, for one. Think how much effort it took to set up your original Shopify store. You probably even needed to hire developers to help with some of the more complicated tasks of setting up your online store.

 Now think about going through all that again every time you want to target a new international market. 

It can be a logistical nightmare, too. Running one online store is a big enough job as it is for most solopreneurs, let alone three, five, or ten stores simultaneously. Every time you want to add a product or make an update, you’ll need to do it across every store. You’ll also need to translate all of the content yourself — an even bigger logistical headache. 

Then there’s the cost. Why pay Shopify fees for every market you want to target when you could pay one fee and target thousands of international shoppers from the same site? 

4. Hire a Shopify developer

If you want to outsource the entire process of creating multi-language versions of your Shopify store, a Shopify developer or agency can help. 

A developer or agency will have experience creating multi-lingual Shopify stores and can help you select the best approach. They may even have a relationship with a translation service that can localize your content. 

This is one of the most hands-off approaches, but it’s also the most expensive option by a long way. Ecommerce agency Aureate Labs estimates it costs between $2,000 and $5,000 to build a medium-sized store and more than $10,000 to build an enterprise-level store. 

5. Use Lokalise Flow

The easiest and most accurate way to translate your Shopify store content is with Lokalise’s plug-and-translate multilingual Shopify app, Lokalise Flow. 

Lokalise Flow is a no-code translation app that accurately and automatically transforms your store content into any native language. 

Our AI tool compares multiple engines like OpenAI, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google, and DeepL, and runs the  selected translation through language quality assurance tools to check the accuracy and grammar of your results, giving you the best quality translations possible. If that isn’t enough, you can upload your own style guide to ensure consistent and on-brand translations in every language.

• A glossary keeps translations consistent across all languages so you never have to worry about mistranslated industry terminology and slogans. 
• A style guide makes translations sound like you in any language. Keeping your brand voice helps build brand recognition and a deeper connection with your customers.

Finally, for sensitive or high-impact content that needs a human touch, Lokalise Flow will provide a reviewing system that combines AI and a professional translators (coming soon!).

5 multi-lingual Shopify store best practices for better growth

Translating your store’s content is just the beginning. 

Get the most from your multi-lingual Shopify store by following the best practices below. 

Reduce translation costs with AI

Translation costs around $0.22 per word. So unless you have a small store or only want to reach a single international market, using human translators will probably be out of the question.

Fortunately, AI-powered translation tools like Flow can help you create accurate and on-brand translations in minutes. 

Not only will you reduce your translation costs with AI, you’ll also have fewer translators to supervise – meaning more to spend perfecting your store. 

Localize the entire experience

Translating your store’s content isn’t enough if you want to convince international shoppers to purchase. You need to localize the entire e-commerce experience, including the following:

• Currencies
• Measurements
• Dates
• Images
• The checkout process
• Marketing and transactional emails

It’s no good translating your online store content into German without changing the measurements on your product descriptions from inches to cm or if you’re still charging customers in US dollars. 

You’ll even need to take cultural nuances and differences into account during the localization process. A French-speaking shopper won’t necessarily know a lot about baseball, for example. So saying your product “knocks it out of the park,” even translated, probably won’t have the same impact on them as it would an American audience. 

Translate your SEO efforts

There’s another part of your online store you’ll need to translate and localize: your SEO data. You’ll localize some elements, like header tags, when you translate your website’s copy. But there are plenty of other elements used by search engines that you’ll need to go out of your way to translate. These include:

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Image alt tags
• URLs

In almost every case, you’ll need to conduct fresh keyword research rather than just translating your U.S. keywords into your target language. There’s no guarantee Dutch shoppers are going to use direct translations of common English search terms, for example. They’re likely to type culturally specific phrases into search engines instead. 

Finally, you’ll need to add hreflang tags to translated pages. This tag tells Google which language your content is written in. It’s particularly important if you have a multi-lingual store with multiple translations of the same page. 

Make it easy to switch between different languages

A visible language switcher is vital to make sure shoppers actually use the localized versions of your store. After all, what’s the point in spending time, effort, and money translating your store into Spanish if you don’t give Latin American shoppers the opportunity to switch languages from English?

Place language switchers in prominent locations like your website’s navigation bar or footer. Users should be able to spot these as soon as they land on the website. 

Abide by local laws

Many countries and locales have specific tax and data privacy laws that you must comply with when selling to their residents. 

In Europe, for example, you’ll need to abide by GDPR rules, collect Value Added Tax (VAT), and possibly pay import fees. 

3 common Shopify localization mistakes to avoid

Poor quality translations

Poor translation quality can be a big turn-off for international customers. It destroys any good will you build up by translating your site and makes your brand look sloppy and complacent. 

As a result, you need to make sure your translations are accurate and suitable for your audience. 

The first way to avoid poor-quality translations is by using a high-quality localization service to begin with. While every store owner wants to keep translation costs low, you shouldn’t pay for the cheapest translator possible. If you prefer machine translations, then use an AI tool that lets you provide additional context such as a style guide. 

Translations that are off-brand

When you’ve put so much effort into making your store sound like you, it’s understandable that you want your brand voice to shine through in every language.

It helps you build a recognizable brand worldwide. Unfortunately, most machine translation tools make your store sound like every other store. They lack personality and might end up damaging your brand’s reputation.

With AI-powered apps like Flow, translations are always on-brand, never generic, thanks to the context you can give AI engines like style guides and glossaries.

Breaking your store theme

By and large, English is a short, flexible language — even if it can be a pain to learn. That’s not true of other languages, which may be more verbose or have much longer words in general.

Take German, for example. Research by Intercontact Translations finds German has an average of 6.38 letters per word compared to English’s 5.195 letters. 

That may not seem like a big difference, but when you consider “retail” translates as “einzelhandel,” it’s easy to see how translation can break your site’s design and ruin images if you don’t leave room to grow. 

Give your translators as much context as possible to avoid these kinds of scenarios. 

While some apps break the code of your store theme, Lokalise Flow integrates seamlessly with all themes. We can also keep the rest of the content here though.

Shopify multi-language FAQ

Boost sales internationally, starting today 

Creating a multi-lingual Shopify store gives you a massive opportunity to reach thousands of new customers, deliver an exceptional customer experience, and send your sales figures soaring. 

There are lots of ways to translate your Shopify store, but there’s only one that lets you do so accurately, cost-effectively and at scale. 

Lokalise is launching an app exclusively for Shopify that accurately translates your entire store, catalog, products, and website: Lokalise Flow.

What makes Lokalise Flow the right fit for your store?

• The highest translation quality in Shopify, thanks to multiple powerful AI engines that work together to offer contextual and culturally relevant translations.
• On-brand and consistent translations. Your brand will sound like you in every language thanks to a customizable style guide and glossary.
• Minimal effort. You won’t need a dedicated technical team or in-house translators to go global with your store. Lokalise Flow integrates with your Shopify store in 5 minutes and a few clicks. 

Discover how you can unlock new markets and boost sales with Lokalise Flow by joining the Beta program today. 

What you’ll get when you join the beta program 

• Free access to Lokalise Flow
• Early access to new features
• Direct support from our product team.