Ecommerce localization, the dos and dont´s. So you want to open up your ecommerce site to a whole new market, but you are at a loss to how to best take your first steps. You know you have a good product and that it would sell but are unsure about how to best localize your website. Well, I hope that with this article I am able to answer some questions that you may have when entering into this new exciting journey.
When translating or localizing your website, there are a lot of things to take into account: type of website (with a regular influx of new products or with static content), size of the website, parts of the website that must be translated and parts that don’t or shouldn’t be, quality of localization and setup for maximum SEO optimization, etc.
Ecommerce translation!
If you have a relatively low number of products or content on your website, it will be relatively easy to translate, as these won’t change or won’t change very often, and it can be done relatively quickly. However, if you have a large and varying stock, translating it may prove much more difficult. This is when workflow must be evaluated.
If the influx of new or updated products is not too large, translating the products as they come may be possible. But, if you have a large influx of new products, this may prove very cumbersome and you may need to ask yourself if you need someone to deal exclusively with entering the new products onto the new website.
Quality before quantity
However, this does not mean that the main part of the website (categories, terms of use, main sellers, etc.) shouldn’t be translated by an experienced and qualified translation professional who will be able to localize your website to your new market.
In situations like this, a mistake people often make when delving into the world of Ecommerce localization is deciding that the quality of the end product is not important and that they just want a website translated into the target language as quick as possible, without the quality of the translation being important (I even had the CEO of an Ecommerce company tell me once that she wanted a crap translation, done quickly). This is the worst thing you could do, and I am sure that your SEO specialists would agree. If you want bad quality translations, you need only use an automatic translator, but as we all know, that won’t help your search engine positioning. Therefore, quality is of paramount importance.
The important thing is that you identify those key aspects of your website that need translating and make sure these are taken care of. Localization professionals will tailor the translations to your new market, to make sure that the user recognizes the products in question and to optimize search results.
You must also decide on what not to translate (if there is anything that doesn’t need translating). Blogs, for example, are often not worth translating and it may be better to create an entirely new blog in the new market’s language.
To sum up, there are at least two important lessons to be taken from this: 1. Quality before quantity, stand out among the other local websites instead of being dumped in with all the pretenders; and 2. Tailor your new website to the new market, make sure that you are pushing the products which are most popular and recognizable in the new market and make sure that the website’s features are easily recognized by the target market.