Going multi-lingual with your e-commerce site is, as most people will tell you, a great idea. But when business owners actually sit down and try to work out a path from being a mono-lingual to multi-lingual site, they often realise that path is fraught with various roadblocks!

In this article series, we’ll be taking a deep dive into all aspects of building your multi-lingual online store, giving you the tools you need to decide whether the move is for you and your business.

Today, our mission is simple – to examine why the move is worthwhile. If you’re not sure what multi-lingual e-commerce is, or whether it might be useful for you, this is the article for you!

Let’s get started.

What is multi-lingual e-commerce?

We’ll start with a simple definition of what we’re going to be looking at for the next few days. Multi-lingual e-commerce means that your online store, and all of its products, and their descriptions, and often even the currency you use to transact are offered in several different languages. There are multiple ways in which you can choose to go about bringing multi-lingual options to your online store, from plugins (if your site is hosted on WordPress, Magento or another popular Content Management System) to app solutions (such as Shopify) and we’ll be taking a closer look at the ‘how’ in future articles.

For now, though, it’s important to understand that digital marketers agree that offering multilingual e-commerce is a best practice, and in your business’ best interests – when it’s done right. That’s crucial, because there’s a lot that can go wrong in the process of translating your website, and you’ll want to be able to present an easily navigable and (for search engines) indexable site to make the investment in ‘going global’ worthwhile. Again, though, that’s a story for another day!

Let’s get positive for now (!) and take a look at the benefits of multilingual e-commerce. It’s time to consider why your business might want to take the plunge.  

Benefit #1 – Attract a bigger audience with a better user experience

Arguably the biggest and most important benefit of offering multi-lingual experiences on your online store is the larger audience you can now access. In a globalised world where English is an exceedingly important language, taught in schools all over the world, it’s easy to forget that about 80% of the world do not speak English – at all! 

That’s a huge amount of potential customers that your business won’t reach if it doesn’t offer foreign language support of any kind. And let’s touch on the ‘user experience’ phrase again, or what we digital marketers like to call ‘UX’ (sounds cool, huh?).

Even if your customers can speak English as a second language, it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to want to make financial decisions in a language that isn’t their native tongue. 

I’ve built up a decent level of French over the years (from GCSE-level to somewhat intermediate, with the help of some great French TV series and films), but I’ve got to be honest – I’d probably never make an online purchase in French. Often, product descriptions use quite technical language to describe item measurements and specifications. Imagine buying a Macbook in German (the length of the words used would be quite frightening – if you’ve ever ‘Deutsch gesprochen’, you’ll know what I’m talking about!). There’s a world of difference between asking for directions and making online purchases.

So, even people who do speak English aren’t necessarily going to make purchases on your site if you don’t offer them an option in their native tongue.

Benefit #2 – More languages = more visibility for search engines (SEO)

It’s easy to forget, so ubiquitous is the rainbow-coloured logo of Google, that the Silicon Valley giant is not actually the number one search engine in many countries, including China and Japan. We hope we don’t have to tell you that these are *huge* potential markets for your business!

But Google also has international variants, and needless to say, if you’re not offering international versions of your online store, you’re unlikely to rank when a French or German user runs a search in their native language.

By taking the time to build a multi-lingual ecommerce experience, you can effectively multiply your number of ranking key terms and phrases on major search engines by the order of magnitude of the number of new languages you’re offering.

For example, just by providing a full translation of your site in French and German alone, you’re probably tripling the number of key terms you’re ranking for – and perhaps the benefit will be bigger still, as you may even be accessing new search engines that weren’t previously available to you!

This is especially true if you can follow SEO best practice in your URL structure – and admittedly, that can get a little bit complex. But following a logical categorisation of your product pages, with each page fitting a logical, and search-engine readable, URL structure, will ensure even more exponential returns when it comes to search engine ranking. 

For example, it’s one thing to translate, say, a product page that is yourwebsite.com/computers/apple/mice-and-keyboards to a product page that is the French equivalent (I hope I don’t embarrass myself here):

 yourwebsite.com/souris-et-claviers 

But it’s something else entirely to actually replicate that same structure in the language you’re translating to. Like the following (*takes a deep breath*): 

yourwebsite.com/ordinateurs/apple/souris-et-claviers 

This kind of stuff seems minor – maybe even pedantic – to human readers like us. But it’s this sort of stuff that search engines absolutely love …in their strange, robotic, indexy kind of way.

We’ll take a closer look at SEO for multilingual websites a bit later on in this article series – and it’s also a service that we offer here at Saint Digital. Let us know using our Contact form if you’d like a free consultation for your business about how we may be able to help you – even it’s just a bit of advice that will send you on your own journey.  

Anyway, to tie this off, the broadening of your keyword and keyphrase depth, the improved organic inbound traffic from international locations, and the increased visibility and readability to international search engines make the SEO benefit to ‘going global’ with your website truly invaluable. 

Benefit #3 – Understand your customers and improve your product line

The third key benefit of offering multi-lingual support on your store website often flies under the radar – and it’s a shame because it offers a huge opportunity for you and your business to improve your product line, relationship (and trust) with your customer base and, ultimately, sales and revenue! 

I’m talking about the level of insight you’ll gain on users from different cultures and countries, giving you crucial (and often invaluable) information on how you can develop your product line to appeal to those people, improving your level of customer satisfaction and exposure to new markets.

It really is, in a small way, a way to broaden your horizons as a business. Just as travelling the world can offer new perspectives, comparing the way your userbase in India, for example, use the site, to your customers back home in the UK, can give you new ideas for how to develop your website and the experience it offers. 

Getting started in doing so is easy – all you need is an installation of Google Analytics on your website. The cookies Google uses to track your website users can filter your audience by which country they’re browsing from, allowing you to create demographic profiles and observe possible differences in how users of different nationalities browse your site.

Above: Saint Digital’s traffic from last week, with ‘Source’ information telling us how our users landed on our site.

Google Analytics offers you all sorts of useful information on your userbase. This might range from what products they like (most visited product page), to how long they spend on your website (which may offer insight on the quality of the translation you’re offering in their language), to which page they most typically bounce (leave your site) from.

Simply beginning to generate these insights now will offer a cumulative benefit over the months and years to come. As you improve the user experience for the demographic base you’re tracking, you’re naturally going to distinguish your business from your competition, and heck, if you do a good job? It might even lead to you becoming a market leader in a new market.

Let’s face it – all markets are ultimately becoming globalised, with the enormous potential for connectivity the Internet offers us. So, the sooner you can establish a foothold, and even a leading position in new international markets, the harder it will be for your competition to knock you off your perch! 

That’s why it’s better to get started sooner rather than later with translating your retail website. 

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that multilingual is the way to go for online businesses. While it would be wrong to imagine that the process will necessarily be smooth (the word ‘multilingual’ can send some web developers into fevered sweats, such can be the complexity from a design perspective of getting everything working correctly), for most businesses it will be an investment that pays off. In an increasingly globalised world, market leaders will be the ones who can offer the best experience to the most people, internationally.

Not sure how to get started with going multilingual with your own business, or simply want to know if it’s the right move for you? Get in touch with us for a free consultation.