You probably already recognize how difficult it can be to break into international markets. Not only is offering a product worldwide expensive from a shipping point of view, but attracting international traffic isn’t easy, either. You have to know your market, adapt your product to global preferences, and build confidence between your business and your customer. As eCommerce localization of your content becomes synonymous with success, it’s time to focus on growing your company internationally so you can be recognized as a worldwide product or service leader. When done correctly, eCommerce localization can accomplish this.

eCommerce Localization: Quick Facts

There’s no doubt that there is business to be done outside of our borders, and customers that can be reached with accurate eCommerce localization. Just how much? According to Internet Retailer, global eCommerce will increase to 16.4% in 2017 to $2.197 trillion, with website sales accounting for over 8% of total retail. The top market? Per Internet Retailer, China is truly growing. This should be a region to target if your marketing data is telling you that there is a need for your product in China.

According to Internet Retailer, China’s growth over the next 5 years is estimated to exceed $1 trillion in eCommerce sales by 2018, which accounts for it being the second largest eCommerce market (the USA being the first). Localization into Chinese should be done by a professional translation company that has actual native speaking translators in China. The geographical Chinese market you are targeting will determine which type of Chinese is most appropriate for your eCommerce localization. Chinese localization can either be Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese. A common misconception is that Mandarin or Cantonese are target languages to translate a website into. Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken Chinese. Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese are the written languages for eCommerce localization.

In addition to China, there are other marketplaces worldwide to consider for eCommerce localization. Brazil, Japan, Germany, France, and Canada are markets that are growing in eCommerce revenue. I can’t stress enough the importance of working with in-country translators for proper localization. If you’re going to invest in doing this, you have to do it the right way. If you are targeting Canada, you must localize your content into Canadian French. You can’t expect a Canadian French speaking consumer to appreciate and buy your product if it is not localized accurately for his/her market. Google Translate is an even worse option. Without having a professional translator work on your content, you are at risk for embarrassing translations that simply do not make sense. Especially if you are going into a new market, you may have one chance to make a lasting impression. The last thing you want to do is offend any potential client. Some of the largest companies in the world have made embarrassing localization mistakes because they did not do their homework when localizing their marketing materials. All it takes is finding the right partner and taking the time to fully research how to accurately get your message across.

eCommerce Localization: Baby Steps

One important thing to keep in mind as you work on growing globally: eCommerce localization is profitable in its own time, it’s an investment. You can’t expect a flourishing bottom line just because you’re branching out, nor can you expect the same number of clients, purchases, and profits internationally that you’re currently seeing domestically, at least not right away. While there can be many countries that are appealing to sell to, sometimes a phased approach works best. You need to crawl before you walk as they say! I recommend starting with the major markets in which your data is showing that sufficient interest exists for your product, and consider eCommerce localization to communicate with potential consumers in that geography in their native language as the first starting point.

eCommerce localization yields great results when done correctly, but it isn’t going to happen overnight. Have patience, prioritize, and take the time to make the right decisions.

One of my eCommerce clients, PuffCuff, sells in over 40 countries worldwide. Since Brazil was a large market for PuffCuff, for localization purposes their prioritization was to partner with Interpro to localize their eCommerce website into Brazilian Portuguese. This was the initial language of choice to appeal to consumers in this market in their native language. This also included translating text that appears in demonstration videos, in addition to product packaging. The Brazilian Portuguese website is now live, and provides detailed product and how-to-use information to Brazilian Portuguese speakers.

Building an International Team for eCommerce Localization

Your eCommerce localization marketing doesn’t end with accurate translations. You need international partnerships to grow your traffic, and you’ll want to recruit the right people to make sure your team has the best members possible, especially for global growth. Simply translating your content and product information into another language isn’t enough. You need to focus on your international marketing, just like you would on the domestic end.

As a client example, in addition to eCommerce localization for the PuffCuff website, one additional avenue for sales growth is through their Brand Ambassador program. The program entails having product representatives in several countries, including Trinidad and Tobago, promote the PuffCuff product and its benefits. Seeing actual demonstrations done in person can be very valuable, and multimedia localization for your eCommerce content is another great way to achieve this.

eCommerce Localization: YouTube

Oftentimes, “seeing is believing.” At least for myself, if I am making a product purchase, when I see it used in action I am more likely to have a connection with the product versus just reading about a description on the packaging. YouTube is a great avenue to have product videos reach millions of potential buyers. When looking to market to international audiences, a localization of the actual videos can be very helpful, whether this is done through voice over translation or actual subtitling of the videos. eCommerce localization for your multimedia can enhance your international sales and perception with multilingual buyers worldwide. International consumers can navigate YouTube in over 75 languages.

Amazon Translation for Your Sales Channels

Using a sales channel like Amazon International Marketplace? Your success will stall if you’re not focused on making eCommerce localization part of your sales channel growth, especially with the reports that Amazon experiences a 22 percent year-over-year jump in international sales in recent years. Trusting a professional localization company will help you with Amazon translation for your global products to speak accurately to your current and potential customers that are native speakers. When done correctly, Amazon translation allows your product information to not only be culturally adapted to reach a wider audience, but it also keeps your brand consistent across all languages, building confidence with global buyers.

Additional eCommerce localization considerations

It’s also easy to forget about all of the little things that add up in eCommerce localization, like reference to metric values, foreign currency, and international shipping. Without mention of these things, your company may be global, but it will not be inclusive or as effective as it can be. A customer needs more than just text information in their language when buying a product—they want to feel as though you care about them and your relationship with them and their business. Often, this means changing shipping forms to make room for international addresses, taking a hit on your bottom line to offer competitive international shipping rates, and providing customer support in foreign languages.

Final thoughts on eCommerce Localization

No matter what end of the spectrum you are on as a business owner, if you are a global company trying to sell around the world, eCommerce localization is an important marketing tool to consider. The localization of your eCommerce content will benefit you at some point, whether it results in initial sales with multilingual speakers or an improved brand perception to those consumers who appreciate the fact that you took the time to accurately translate your materials.

For many business owners, eCommerce localization starts with thinking of it as another investment. Focus on it as a marketing tactic for your global audience. Our friends at Sticker Mule, a company that ships their products to 87 countries, have written a great article on how to build an international eCommerce company. Here at Interpro, we have partnered with Sticker Mule to adapt their marketing content and product information for other cultures so that they can seamlessly build a relationship with other countries.

Long story short, you just have to get started. It can be a difficult and daunting task, but with the right partnerships, you can successfully grow your company internationally. Consider Interpro as a resource to assist. We’ll be an extension of your team, and will only recommend to you what we feel is in your best interests.

The post Unlocking Global Growth: How to Succeed with eCommerce Localization appeared first on Interpro Translation Solutions.

Amazon is the world’s largest e-tailer, and it’s growing relentlessly. So, too, are an Amazon seller’s opportunities and challenges. Branching out into a new market, selling in product categories that are gated, knocking down shipping costs and breaking language barriers – these are questions you’ll need to face, sooner or later. But the first question an Amazon seller asks is: ‘Where do I begin?’

Before we go into what it takes to expand internationally on Amazon, we should first point out that language plays a big part in the process. Relying on the resources of a multinational team can open doors for you on venues that don’t use your native language, as we’ll see below.

So, here’s how to go about expanding:

1. Choose a Venue

There are several things to consider here. Catalog size, inventory size, logistics, profitability estimates, your product’s local demand and popularity, the type of competition, etc. Figure out what resources you’d have to put into each one of these venues, find the pros and cons of selling on them, and then narrow down your list to 2-3 options.

2. Sort out Taxes

While taxes, duties and custom fees can be very similar on certain types of goods for neighboring countries, aspects like tax registration and filing tax returns can be very different. Germany’s tax system, for instance, is hard to navigate, by all accounts.

With only 2-3 venue options left, it’s much easier to look into tax requirements for these ‘finalists’ only, rather than all 14 venues. Try to get a realistic estimate based on the type of products you’d like to sell, preferably from accountants who operate in the countries you’ve selected.

3. Set Out Your Price Strategy

There are experts out there who can provide price calculation samples for you to see and compare. Once you’ve also prepared an estimate of how much you can hope to sell and earn based on the price calculation sample, it should be much easier to decide which venue to go with. Also, now is the time to set out your overall strategy, and to think about how you’d like to price your products to turn your goals into reality.

4. Speak to Local Sellers

By now, you must have a clear favorite. But before you commit to anything, look for unbiased advice from Amazon sellers with experience. We recommend speaking to local, experienced sellers face-to-face, if possible. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt to travel to the country in question, to get a feel for how businesses are run there, and to familiarize yourself with customs and other cultural aspects.

Local Amazon sellers may be able to offer valuable insights. Issues like Lang Law, for instance, may not be on an accountant or a consultant’s agenda, but a French Amazon seller may be able to offer some insider tips.

5. Open an Account

Now you’ve made up your mind, you’ll need to set those wheels in motion. Amazon representatives can help set up the new account, transfer your listings to the new platform, and occasionally offer some insider tips.

From then on, you should consider using professional human translators, and ideally a one-stop professional translation company that can serve as a partner to centralize all translations. Assigning them to take control of content creation for your listings will help your product descriptions sound more natural. The best translation company for you will vary. Whichever approach you decide upon, please ensure translators are professionals and are paired by subject matter expertise. The message you convey to Amazon users via storefront information is also very important, and translators can make sure that you come across as a reliable and customer-oriented seller.

6. Find Customer Support Staff

You’ll need someone to handle your incoming and outgoing communication with Amazon representatives and buyers. Amazon has made it very clear that it expects native or fluent speakers to handle emails in the local language, whichever fulfillment channel you use. You may need to choose between having in-house representatives and relying on professional translators to carry out the task.

7. Outsource Some of Your Operations

There are three ways to go about selling on a new venue: trying it on your own, relying on third-party experts, or depending on an Amazon representative from the Services Team (provided you received a formal invitation).

For smaller, below-the-radar sellers, this tends to be a two-sided debate, because Amazon’s reps tend to focus on more prominent sellers. Also, for those who have the privilege of being invited, the deal-breaker is the fact that once the account is up and running, the appointed representative is no longer there to help.

We recommend the second option – relying on delegates who can give you access to their business partners, warehouses and logistics. You may be able to outsource most of your operations, in fact. Some third-party experts can handle all of the issues mentioned above, and they can help you meet performance targets, reinstate lost privileges or keep track of changing regulations.

If you’d like to learn more about the advantages of using third-party support from Amazon merchant specialists to expand internationally, download the free Global Selling eBook. Better yet, check out SellerEngine’s service package, and let’s grow your business together! SellerEngine makes Amazon easy.

The post Conquering Amazon Globally: 7 Steps to Expand Your Business Internationally appeared first on Interpro Translation Solutions.

Speak the Language

In a Harvard Business Review study, it was found that over 72% of shoppers spend most or all of their time on websites in their own language and nine out of 10 Internet users said that, when given a choice of languages, they always visited a website in their own language. Shoppers are looking for product information in their native language. If your product information is not in their native language, you will miss out on a potential sale not because your product isn’t good, but because the non-translated content isn’t relevant to the shopper.

However, it isn’t enough to just run your website text through Google Translate. Google Translate spits back words and phrases that are often only approximate matches, so you run the risk of putting out content that could be inaccurate or offensive to customers on your website. To take your website content to the next level, consider localizing your website. Localization is much more than translation. With localization, you adapt your website content to fit the local language and culture of your target market. It takes cultural context, colloquialisms, and even website imagery into account. Localization makes a website “natural” to local shoppers.

Show me the Money

Adjust the display of your product prices to reflect the shopper’s local currency. Give your shopper the ability to select their country of origin and/or their preferred currency. Without the automatic conversion of prices into a shopper’s preferred currency, the shopper will be forced to go off the website to check the conversion rate and do the math themselves, or even worse, the shopper will look for the product on another website that displays the price in a format that is familiar to them. With either of those options, your eCommerce website is creating friction in the online shopping journey, which will lead to lower conversion rates and lost sales.

SEO to Keep the Traffic Flow

Localizing your website content and showing prices in different currencies are both important pieces of optimizing your eCommerce website for international audiences, but there are several SEO aspects that need to be considered so you can rise to the top of searches in your international markets. A fundamental, but often overlooked, piece of this strategy is choosing your URL structure. Do you pick a country level domain—www.website.ca? Do you select a country based directory—www.website.com/ca? Each has their own benefits. By selecting a country level domain, your website gains an identity that can help with local search engines, but with a directory, you can take advantage of the SEO credibility that the main website already has.

Once you have a domain selected, it’s time to think about the tactics of your SEO strategy. One major aspect of an SEO strategy is your keyword plan. Make sure that keywords are optimized in each language that you are targeting. Some keywords may not make sense in some languages, and that’s okay! Omit it if it doesn’t make sense for that audience. When in doubt, get input from a multilingual resource who knows your business and industry, such as a professional translation partner or an in-country resource.

With 51% of the world’s population on the internet, it’s important that your eCommerce website speaks to as many of those potential customers as possible. Strategies like localization, displaying pricing in local currencies, and crafting a targeted SEO strategy will help you get in front of millions of potential customers, enhancing their eCommerce shopping experience and increasing your business’ success.

The post Going Global? How to Optimize Your eCommerce Website for International Audiences appeared first on Interpro Translation Solutions.

Last year, James Thompson – one of the organizers of the inaugural PROSPER Show –contacted Interpro to see if we would be interested in sending someone to participate in a panel discussion at the show which was to take place in Salt Lake City February 8-9, 2016. The objective of the discussion was to provide information to participants who were interested in taking their on-line Amazon businesses international, including best practices for developing multilingual websites, providing international fulfillment, and optimizing shipping to various geographical locations around the globe. Given our multilingual website experience, I thought this was a good opportunity and decided to participate.

Multilingual Website Education and Research Best Practices

PROSPER is an organization focused on sharing best practice Education and Research materials to Professional Retailers Online and Solution Providers. This first-ever PROSPER event was focused on online sellers seeking to improve their business on Amazon. It featured over 10 ex-Amazon leaders and CEOs/General Managers of over 30 solution providers using a workshop and seminar approach to help sellers learn how to build better online businesses.

The keynote speaker was John Rossman, an ex-Amazon executive who was at Amazon in the early days with Jeff Bezos. The theme of his talk was “The Amazon Way”, and each attendee was given a copy of his new book titled The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company. The discussion – and the book – both provide excellent insights into what drives the on-line behemoth, and why it works.

One of the hot topics was the panel I participated in: “Tools Needed To Prepare to Sell Internationally”. On this subject, it is interesting to point out that Amazon has 10 marketplaces in the world, located in key countries in Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK), Asia (China, India, Japan), and North America (Canada, US). China is the largest marketplace in terms of overall revenue. In addition to translating their product information for Amazon,a multilingual website is essential for organizations looking to expand to diverse customers.

Multilingual Websites Ensure a Positive Client Experience

If a company wants to sell on one of these marketplaces, Amazon requires that all product descriptions be translated into the language(s) of the marketplace(s) they want to sell on. Additionally, sellers are required to provide support in these languages. Everything Amazon recommends is geared to achieving high customer satisfaction. For example, to prevent a poor customer experience, communicating using machine translation is highly discouraged, as this may result in low quality translation and poor communication.

Amazon does offer language services, but companies who prefer to manage and control the process can of course do it themselves. Because of the linguistic requirements and the interest in increasing sales by providing content in the language of each seller’s target audience, there was a lot of interest in the topic of translation and an in-depth discussion of best practices sellers can follow in order to be successful.

It was emphasized in the discussion that having a multilingual website can go a long way toward connecting with your target audience. Common Sense Advisory, in an exhaustive 2014 research study (“Can’t Read, Won’t Buy”), delved into how translation affects the web customer experience. Among other things, CSA concluded that international visitors spend more time on  and prefer to buy from multilingual websites where information is available in their native language.

It comes as no surprise that Amazon takes an avid interest in helping organizations sell on its platform, and offers a lot of assistance to ensure that they receive healthy seller scorecards.

This inaugural event was incredibly successful with over 750 attendees converging on Salt Lake City in order to find ways to increase their on-line businesses. Key to achieving a high degree of success in the international marketplace is for organizations to connect with their global audiences by providing their information in the languages of their clients. A good start is to make sure that they invest in multilingual websites to enhance their international eCommerce potential.

Copyright © 2014 by Common Sense Advisory, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.

The post Expert Insights: Ralph Strozza Shares Knowledge at Prosper Show appeared first on Interpro Translation Solutions.

You can dramatically grow your eCommerce company with eCommerce localization services.

Benefits of eCommerce localization

If you are not selling your products internationally, it is likely that your competitors are. Thanks to online global shopping events such as Cyber Monday, internet shopping has skyrocketed within the past the past few years. As the global landscape becomes more narrow, communicating in the language of your target audience grows more important.

Question 1:

What exactly is eCommerce localization?

The art of translating your online profile, product descriptions, database-driven content, and graphic images into the language of your new target audience with cultural sensitive accuracy.

Question 2:

How exactly can this benefit me?

Firstly, you have the ability to reach a wider audience with minimal effort. Once your website is localized, you can keep costs low since products can be shipped relatively quickly.

Likewise, customers are more likely to build trust in your product if your product descriptions are in their own language. It is also a good idea to own country-level domains for target countries and to provide a simple way to convert the price into their currency.

You should consider your target audience when designing your eCommerce site. Although there is a general movement towards a single global set of best practices, keeping the persona in mind when designing your country-level domains adds to the customer experience.

The user interface for your website should reflect the needs of the persona you are targeting.

The Amazon example

Amazon has great examples demonstrating how to localize your eCommerce site to specific markets. Amazon’s website in the UK has a different design from the website targeted towards customers in the United States. Amazon also focuses on different products depending on which market is being targeted.

Both the UK and US localized sites focus on eBooks and Kindles.

Amazon’s UK site

Amazon’s US site

Amazon’s Japan site

The Japan localized site focuses on entertainment and electronics.

Amazon’s India site

The India localized site focuses on mobile phones.

Sometimes, you can learn new things from merely looking at a localized website. Based on the above examples from Amazon, it appears that Indian consumers are more tolerate of advertising as there are third party adverts along the right hand side. There are no third party adverts hosted on the other three sites.

Understanding these cultural and local needs with eCommerce localization is imperative if you would like to succeed in the global market. If a consumer doesn’t see what they want almost instantly, they are likely to leave your website and find a different eCommerce site better suited for their needs.

Conclusion

When you have a retail business that has limited opportunities to grow because of competition, prices or technology– you should consider going global by growing your target audience, and one of the best ways to do this is by localizing your eCommerce website.

Nowadays, the possibilities of who you can reach with an international eCommerce site are virtually endless. With a little market research and an eCommerce localization service provider, you can explore those outlets in no time.

To learn more about how the right localization strategy can benefit your business, please click here.

The post Take Your Business Global: The Power of eCommerce Localization appeared first on Interpro Translation Solutions.