Multilingual E-commerce Tips: What to Do and What to Avoid

Tips on Multilingual E-commerce: What to Do and What to Avoid

Multilingual e-commerce allows you to sell products and services and expand your business in the foreign market without necessarily having to open a physical store.

Starting a multilingual e-commerce increases the chances of selling your products and helps you reach the greatest number of customers possible at an international level. 

But for this to happen and for you to attract traffic from European and foreign users, you need to devise a strategy and build your site in the different languages ​​of the countries of reference.

In this article we provide you with some advice on what to do and above all what to avoid to start your e-commerce multilingual.

Multilingual e-commerce: what to do

To develop amultilingual e-commerce you must:

• Study the competition and analyze the target audience.
• Pay attention to international SEO and keyword research.
• Write and translate content into the language of the country of reference.
• Create a marketing strategy international.

Let’s look at these points in the list in detail.

Study of the competition and the target

One ​​of the first steps to take, before starting an e-commerce, is to analyze the competition and the target.

As regards a multilingual e-commerce, the analysis of the competition and the target cannot be done only on a specific geographical area but rather a diversified study must be done on each country of reference.
There are many free or paid tools that allow you to check sites similar to yours, the traffic of competitor sites, analyze and extrapolate useful data on the target.

International SEO and keyword research

Creating a multilingual e-commerce for the sale of international products requires not only, as we have just seen, analysis of the competition and the target but also an international SEO strategy that allows you to: 

• Analyze competitor sites that are among the top positions in the search engine.
• Obtain keywords related to the target audience in the country where you want to sell your products. 
• Check the link building strategy of your international competitors, so you can choose relevant sites in the country where you want to operate.
• Optimize your content in SEO to improve the user experience and at the same time increase conversions.

In this case too, international SEO analysis can be done using certain tools that allow you to analyze data, search results, the SERPs of various countries and the keywords used by users. 

Writing and translating content

Once you have completed the target, competition, SEO and related keyword research, you can proceed with writing the content.

The production of content should be entrusted to native copywriters or web writers or in any case experts in the cultural and linguistic context of the country and the target audience, in order to best construct your content. 

In fact, some errors should be avoided such as: automatic translations or translations from content in Italian. 

International Marketing Strategy

Starting a multilingual online business in a foreign country requires attention to laws and customs and foreign users. Each country has its own regulations on consumer rights and therefore you will have to comply with their laws.  
Therefore, before starting an e-commerce it is important to learn about commercial communications, packaging, return policies, labeling.

For example, in Germany, safe packaging and clear and precise labeling with the data relating to the content and the company that handles the shipment are mandatory. 

On the user side, you need to take into account: the preferred payment methods, communication methods, customer service and after-sales service that they prefer. 

Multilingual e-commerce: what to avoid

What to avoid when you are creating or want to create amultilingual e-commerce: 

• Ignoring the design preferences of foreign users
• Ignoring SEO and Keyword Research
• Not having a marketing strategy for the international market
• Not having a native copywriter write the content or translate it automatically

Here is a detailed explanation of each item in the list. 

Do not adapt the design of the site to an international market

In this case, you need to pay attention to the design preferences of the country where you want to sell your products. As interesting and captivating as the design of an Italian site may be, users in the country where you are targeting may not appreciate it. For example, Chinese e-commerce sites have an eccentric design full of images and bright banners. 

It is therefore clear that during the analysis of the target you will also have to do research on user preferences in order to adapt the design of the site to the international market. 

Omitting SEO and keyword research

Another mistake not to make is to ignore SEO and keyword research, this applies to every country. Not having a strategy in this sense is counterproductive and you would risk not seeing a launch for your e-commerce.

So, analyze the way in which foreign users perform their searches and with which keywords, they could be different from the searches performed by Italian users. 
The same goes for SEO, analyze the positioning of the sites within the search engine, how their contents are SEO optimized and build your SEO strategy. 

Don’t have a marketing strategy

If you want to sell all over the world you need to know the culture, ideas and preferences of each country. 

Build content, to be updated continuously, for each type of customer and the type of communication they prefer. 

In addition to the content, for a good marketing strategy pay attention to the payment methods preferred by foreign users and the type of customer service they prefer. Not paying attention to these aspects would be counterproductive for your business. 
There are also other aspects that you should not overlook if you want your strategy to be successful: for example, avoid neglecting the regulations of each country. Each country has its own laws on consumer rights, commercial communications, return policies, packaging and labeling. 

Do not entrust the work of the contents to a copywriter 

Not entrusting the production of the contents to a copywriter could be a risk. The native copywriter or web writer will, instead, be able to build content by exploiting the linguistic and cultural knowledge of the country in which you want to position yourself and use the right keywords for foreign users. 

It is a mistake to subject content to automatic translation, the keywords are not the same for all countries and therefore the positioning is also different. 
The native copywriter will be able to communicate with foreign customers and this will allow you to create a relationship with them based on trust and to have numerous conversions, because you will communicate a great sense of belonging to their country.

Translating content with Google Translate

Rely on a native expert or copywriter and do not delegate the translation of texts to Google Translate. 

It is a mistake to think of producing content in Italian and then translating it, because: 

• The keywords change for each country, target and search intent.
• Linguistic expressions are clearly different for each country and therefore only a native speaker or expert translator can know them. 
• Translations of Italian texts do not guarantee correct positioning on foreign search engines. 
• Not having a content marketing strategy does not lead to increased conversions and increases the risk of bounce rate on e-commerce.

Conclusion

In this article we have seen how starting a multilingual e-commerce can be very advantageous for a company that will not have to undergo a thousand bureaucratic vicissitudes to open a physical store directly in the place where it wants to sell. 

But if this is a huge advantage for the expansion of your business, you need to pay attention to the things to do and to avoid to best structure your multilingual e-commerce. 

So, let yourself be guided by a native speaker expert both for the construction of the site and for the production of the contents, study the competition, the target and do a search for the keywords used by users.
Finally, implement an international marketing strategy and take care of SEO because it allows you to position yourself in foreign search engines.