Localize, starting with what blocks the purchase: payment and delivery. A flawless translation can't save a site that lacks the country's payment method or promises a ten-day delivery window.
The benchmark
Compare the rate of cart-to-order completion country by country. If international visitors add to cart as often as French shoppers but buy far less, look for the problem at checkout before you look for it in the language of your product pages.
At a perfume house the authors work with, with a few million euros in online sales and more than half from export, three out of four payments that were started never went through.
In France, one session in thirty-five bought; outside Europe, one in a hundred to one in two hundred. Every order, whatever the country, was billed in euros. Canada and the Gulf completed one payment in ten, the eurozone one in three. Switzerland and Sweden completed as well as the eurozone, also in euros: currency was a factor, not the only cause.
An international order was worth two to three times a French order.
The rule
Localize in the order of what keeps people from paying: payment methods, delivery time and cost, return terms from their country. Then the language of the purchase path and product pages. The rest comes after.
The starting point seen most often was described by a fashion brand executive at a workshop:
"A copy-paste of what we do for France: a Shopify Markets setup for price catalogs and currencies, and for the ads it's translation."
The authors have shipped that copy-paste more than once.
The steps
- Currency. Show prices in the local currency. On Shopify, rounding is a toggle that applies each currency's usual price ending; for a specific round price, set it in the market's catalog.
- Payment. Offer the country's dominant payment method.
- Delivery. Give a realistic date and return address, with duties included in the price.
- Review. Have someone from the country check the payment flow and order emails, focusing on the languages you can't judge yourself. An agency head put it this way at a workshop: "Japanese, work with someone. English, easier to judge yourself."
- Units. Adapt sizes and measurements.
A sentence to say to your leadership, to adapt for your countries:
"Before we translate one more page, we look at the cart-to-order rate by country. The country where it's half the French rate has a checkout problem, not a language problem."
The trap
The trap is machine translation of the pages that commit you: terms of sale, size guide, confirmation emails.
A mistake on a product page might raise a smile, but a mistake in return terms costs the sale. And think about customer service: if you sell in German, you need to be able to answer in German.
The reverse happens too, as Conversion Club covered in its international guide: a French brand converting at 4% opened Germany with a translation reviewed by a reputable agency, and six months later the German site was stuck at 0.9%.
The product wasn't the problem. German customers didn't see themselves in the site, and left without complaining.
