With the increasing trend of online shopping around the globe, more companies are aiming for globalization. All you have to do is build your e-commerce store considering the Localizing culture and regulations, and you are all set to capture the global audience.
It is quite an oversimplified way of defining localization. Only when you get into the waters of localization, you’ll realize other complexities and challenges come along. To most businesses, Localizing may seem overwhelming. They think it is a complete redesign of your website that requires more investment and hard work. Well, you don’t necessarily have to bite the bullet to make things work for you in a foreign region. You can carry out your Localizing pretty seamlessly and cost-effectively with the right knowledge and methods in place.
6 Key Ingredients of Your E-commerce Site Localization
Localization is a vast concept, and how much of it you need for your business is subjective to your brand, audiences, and scope of business. Here are six major factors that you need to keep in mind while doing e-store localization.
Data Collection
Whenever you think about targeting a new marketplace for your e-commerce website, it is important to get your facts right. All of your Localizing decisions must be backed by authentic, first-hand data about customers and market demographics. Gathering market data will help you understand the customer’s preferences, and the potential of your products to make their place. Moreover, analyzing the market data also gets you to identify the blind spots and challenges that you may face while operating in that particular marketplace.
UX Auditing
When it comes to e-commerce localization, online user experience is the most critical aspect of it. How well you will be able to perform in a market simply boils down to your UX design. That’s why it is significant to audit your UX design and optimize your user experience through localization. So, you must ensure that your platform interface is resonating with the culture and norms of the target region. Similarly, you should go about formatting the user-facing elements in a way that makes it easier for your users to comprehend the information smoothly. If anytime during their experience on your platform your user feels confused, it will only increase their chances of not buying from you.
Translations
There are many businesses that think that localization is all about translation. If not the only one, translation is still the most significant aspect of localization. For the e-store translationf, you need to hire experienced and highly qualified translators with extensive experience in the e-commerce industry. Managing the translations and teams is also another challenge. You have to make sure that your content is ready to be marketed in time, and translations have to be consistent and accurate. If you are using a machine translation tool, it’s better to use the MTPE approach and get your automated translation proofread by the most famous linguists in the industry with good work ethics.
Internationalization
Making your e-store ready for localization starts from the very beginning. You must have it in your mind before writing the first line of the website code. This is the only way you can build your website on localization best practices and save yourself from trouble later. For an e-commerce business, one has to build their website using Unicode and never hard-code any user-facing element inside the code. You should create external file strings for your text and other design elements. So, it will be much easier for your developers and translators to extract them for localization purposes. You can use a professional localization platform to manage all your localization activities smoothly and effortlessly.
Localized Pricing & Customer Services
The user experience is not just about how you have designed or redesigned your website and how good are the translations. There are certainly many other factors that can make or break your user experience. For instance, localized pricing is something you must get your head around, considering the income level and lifestyle choices of customers. If you are selling someone at reasonable rates in India, you don’t necessarily go with the same rates in New York. Similarly, localizing your customer services and providing a multilingual chat option are also other things that can enhance your overall user experience.
Multilingual SEO
Now, as you are targeting multiple regions at the same time, you also need to ensure that you’re accessible and visible to your global audience online. Well, it’s something that may make your localization a bit time-consuming, and you have to be constantly on it. For every region, you have to do separate keyword research and plan the multilingual SEO plan that will help you rank high on Google. You can also hire a professional multilingual SEO LSP that will take care of your global search rankings.
Summing Up!
There are many e-commerce players coming into the market, and competition is getting intense every day. It’s become significant for companies to personalize their user experience through localization, so they can have an edge over other competitors. A localized e-store approach can help you thrive in global markets and capture a higher market share.