Get our complimentary cleverbridge white paper to see if you have the capabilities you need to maximize online sales in foreign markets.
Effective localization creates customer comfort and convenience at every stage of the buying process.
The Internet facilitates international trade like nothing in the history of humanity. As a software vendor, you’re offering a valuable product to customers around the world. But you know that you can’t just enter a market and expect over night success. You need to understand the local culture in which you are trading and adapt your selling techniques accordingly. The process of adapting your offering to a new market is called localization.
With all that being said, there are many areas of your ecommerce business that require localization. For example, the text of your actual product might need to be translated. Your paid search advertisements also need localization. And, of course, your checkout process and shopping cart need to be localized.
“Localization is the process of adapting internationalized software for a specific region or language by adding locale-specific components and translating text.” – via Internationalization and localization – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
It’s important to understand that localization is far more than mere text translation. It requires localized elements and placements aside from text translations – something that provides a familiar experience to the online shopper. Designing the ultimate localized shopping experience depends on:
- Knowing who your visitors are
- Knowing which visitors are converting
- Offering local currencies
- Setting the right price
- Allowing preferred payment methods
- Localizing form fields
- Complying with tax laws
Thanks to a revolutionary growth in pervasive Internet technology, the borders of our global village have collapsed. Though this growth and pervasiveness has created a new paradigm of international trade, it has not created a homogenous set of shoppers.
Each community still retains their particular preferences for marketing and buying that fuel local trade. You’ll need to discover the best methods of tapping into regional markets, and we hope this overview of localizing for global ecommerce will be your guide for optimizing your current offering.
If you partner with a third party ecommerce solution, its imperative that they have capabilities to help you manage your target markets to help increase revenues from those locations.
Did You Know?
The cleverbridge ecommerce platform provides extensive localization capabilities with 30 languages, 29 currencies and 27 payment methods enabling clients to maximize their global sales.
Get our complimentary cleverbridge white paper to see if you have the capabilities you need to maximize online sales in foreign markets.
