Expanding your e-commerce brand internationally opens up exciting opportunities to connect with new audiences and boost your revenue. In fact, Statista reports that the global cross-border B2C ecommerce market value is predicted to reach approximately 8 trillion US dollars by 2030, up from 785 billion US dollars in 2021.
Despite this enormous potential, successful international expansion hinges on a well-executed Shopify localization strategy. Localization isn’t just translating your content to the local language; it involves adapting your entire storefront to meet the needs of diverse markets.
In this guide, we will explore the crucial aspects of Shopify localization, including:
By focusing on these essential elements, you’ll develop a basic understanding of how to make the most of Shopify localization and tap into opportunities for growth in new regions.
Shopify Markets is a powerful tool for global expansion that acts as a central hub within Shopify Admin, bringing together all your regional expansions in one place. This makes it simple to monitor performance across different markets, compare results, and create customized shopper experiences for each new market.
With Shopify Markets, merchants can tailor their entire catalog, currency, domains, and themes to match regional preferences—all from one shop.
As an example, let’s say that you want to expand into Canada. Here are the steps you need to take to execute this:
With Managed Markets, merchants can set up submarkets within an existing market. For example, within the Europe market, you can create a submarket specifically for Germany. This submarket inherits the customizations of the European market but allows for additional adjustments tailored to German buyers. Managed Markets also simplify common complexities of international ecommerce expansion, such as international payments, customs, regulations, shipping and more.
Follow these steps to create a new country in Shopify Markets:
In a recent study, 75% of consumers revealed that they prefer to purchase products in their native language, while 60% rarely buy from English-only websites. This evidence goes to prove that localized content is the foundation of Shopify localization and inevitable for a positive user experience.
Every ecommerce brand needs to consider translating and localizing the following:
A great example of effective localization is the global luxury haircare brand Moroccanoil.
Not only is the language translated to the local audience, but also the product images on their homepage are localized too. Here are screenshots of their German and Swedish online stores for comparison.
Merchants can translate their online Shopify store in the three following ways:
Translate & Adapt App
This app comes in handy for Shopify stores that need basic localization. It provides fast translation of product descriptions and website content into many different languages.
However, it does have limitations. “Translate and Adapt” mainly focuses on textual content, offering limited control over visual elements and design. It’s best for merchants who are looking for a simple, fast translation solution rather than in-depth localization adapted for their audience.
Uploading your own translations using CSV files:
Localizing Storefront Content with Shogun
Shogun’s Personalization feature enables merchants to create segments of site visitors based on their location. These segments can then power page variants that contain localized experiences and translated content for the visitor.
The page importer in Shogun makes it easy to import any Shopify 2.0 page from a theme into Shogun. The imported page becomes the base, and the variants created within the visual editor are served up to the assigned location segments.
To localize pages on your storefront using Shogun, follow these steps:
From a buyer’s perspective, knowing the price relative to the shopper’s local currency is essential to determining whether a product is within budget. In fact, 55% of consumers prefer to make purchases in their local currency.
Even when consumers understand exchange rates for non-local currencies, the additional transaction fees from their bank can create unnecessary friction in the buying process, along with hidden shipping fees and taxes.
US-based athletic backpack brand WOLFpak saw a whopping 528% increase in cross-border revenue by using Managed Markets from Shopify. They overcame previous complexities of unexpected costs and shipping fees, which led to increased conversions.
They display prices in the visitor’s local currency based on their region and clearly indicate that taxes and duties are included. Shipping costs are calculated at checkout, ensuring transparency and eliminating any potential confusion about pricing for the customer.
Through Shopify Payments, merchants can set up their multi-currency features so they can start displaying their prices in different currencies based on where their customer is located.
Setting up multi-currency pricing:
Implementing personalized shipping rates for various regions can help you optimize your pricing strategy and improve customer satisfaction. Here’s how to effectively set region-specific shipping rates.
Setting Specific Shipping Rates:
Adapting your prices to local markets is known as pricing localization. This considers that the merchant has taken into consideration all additional factors, which are currency exchange, taxes and local pricing expectations.
Suppose you’re selling a product in Germany—you’ll need to factor in the VAT (value added tax) when setting your prices. In contrast, if you’re selling in the United States, sales tax varies by state. To remain competitive, it’s essential to adjust your pricing to account for these regional tax differences.
One major advantage of selling internationally is the ability to segment local audiences and tailor your pricing to each market. Consumers in different regions have varying price sensitivities, so why not meet them where they’re comfortable? By adjusting your prices to match what customers in each area are willing to pay, you can maximize sales and better cater to global demand.
This is where dynamic pricing comes in handy. It adjusts your prices in real-time to reflect the current market conditions, local demand and other factors. Here are a few common pricing strategies for global markets:
Product localization goes beyond simply translating product information word-for-word for a local market; it involves adapting your product to truly resonate with the cultural and regional nuances of that specific area.
Here’s how you can successfully localize your product catalogs:
Consumers not only expect customer support, but they also expect it to be available 24/7. And they also value quick responses. In fact, 97% of older consumers were found to be more impatient for a response from customer support compared to younger ones (88%). It obvious to say–but speed is one of the most important components to great customer support.
Three common challenges that customers face often as a result of bad customer support are:
Offering multilingual support in a customer’s native language goes beyond financial incentives like discounts or loyalty programs. Poor customer experiences cost businesses an estimated $62 billion every year. According to CSA Research, 75% of respondents indicated they would be more inclined to buy from a company if customer service was available in their native language.
Misunderstandings caused by language problems can escalate the customer’s problem, and the inability to clearly communicate clearly adds to the stress. Excellent customer service transforms 86% of first-time consumers into loyal fans.
Help Center in Local Language: A practical way to address common customer concerns while minimizing wait times and resource demands is to translate all help resources into the customer’s local language. Organize these resources into sections based on topics such as shipping, payment, delivery, and returns to ensure customers can easily find the information they need. Zara Mexico shows a great example of a localized help center.
Chatbots: Chat support is a popular tool for providing timely assistance to customers. With advancements in AI, many chatbots can now be programmed to operate in local languages. While they may not fully replicate human interaction, chatbots are effective in identifying the nature of an issue and directing customers to relevant resources in the help center. If the issue remains unresolved, the chatbot can escalate the issue by generating a support ticket for human assistance. Sephora’s chatbot executes this very successfully.
Email/Phone Support: Email support is a convenient way to offer customer support in different languages depending on the region. Take Amazon, for example, who offers both chat and phone support in different local languages in their help center to overcome any customer issue. Below is a screenshot of Amazon Germany.
