Setting up an online shop usually requires less investment than a brick and mortar. With attractive design, friendly user interface and great customer service you’ll be able to target more potential buyers and sell more products. But there’s one more thing you can do to get more exposure and increase traffic to your e-commerce website: translate and localise!

Below you can see the most important benefits of translating and adapting your online shop to another culture.

1. Wider global reach

A multilingual e-commerce website which is properly adapted to your target users (e.g. in terms of currencies, measurements or colours) will help you gain a bigger audience. Theoretically, you can reach anyone in the world, as long as you’re willing to ship your products to the selected locations. Customers across the world are willing to buy online, but usually they will prefer to shop in their native language.  By choosing the right languages for your online shop, you can easily target your customers, regardless of the physical distance.  Remember not to stop at the language level only, and make sure that your payment options or terms and conditions are adapted to your international users as well.

2. Higher website traffic

Translation and localisation will also help you improve your website traffic. More languages make the online store accessible to more potential users, and this in turn means more website visits. With higher traffic, you can reach more leads, more sales and finally more business. There are, of course, many other ways to increase the number of visits on your online store, such as optimising your website for SEO or blogging and promoting your articles on social media. Translation and localisation will support all your other marketing and SEO efforts to ensure higher traffic and more online exposure.

3. Increased customer confidence and trust

Do you know that about 42% Internet users never make any purchase decisions in languages different than their own? Online buyers feel more comfortable to use e-commerce websites in their native language to be able to fully understand every single detail. Localisation and translation will help you increase trust and confidence of your potential customers across the world. Make sure to include local addresses or local support numbers on your localised website to be even more accessible and trustworthy to your visitors.

4. Better usability

In the localisation process the design of your online store will be reviewed in terms of the requirements and expectations of your users in each target country or region. The way your users navigate the websites or make purchase decisions might be different depending on their culture and location. To ensure better usability and make your online store user-friendly you might need to implement some new features or tweak your design.  Once your store is adjusted to the needs and expectations of your target users it will be much easier to convert them into your loyal and satisfied clients.

Localisation and translation will help to expand your business and take your e-commerce website to the next level. Apart from creating great localised design or adjusting product descriptions, you’ll also need to target your store at the right consumer groups. Only then you’ll be able to fully use the potential of your localised multilingual online shop!

What do you think are other benefits of localising your e-commerce website? Do you have any experience in adjusting your store to multilingual users? Share your thoughts below!

Dorota Pawlak

Dorota helps digital brands infuse their content with a local touch. She is a localization consultant, translator specialized in IT, prompt engineer, and a book author. Dorota teaches online courses on localization, writes for her blog and a Medium publication. She also runs a Small Biz AI, a Substack newsletter for freelancers and small business owners ready to discover handy AI tools.