The international market is wide open for eCommerce stores. The wider you cast your net, the more you will increase your revenue.
But while going international has massive ROI potential, there are a few things you need to do before you can reach a global audience that converts.
In this guide, we’ll be taking a look at all the multilingual eCommerce essentials you need to put in place right now.
Translate Your Pages
Not every shopper who visits your store will speak English, so it’s essential that one of the first things you do is translate your pages into different languages. This will not only help you build relationships with consumers from all over the world, but it will also boost your conversions.
When translating your pages, it’s a smart idea to cover all the bases. This means translating your product descriptions, order forms, policy pages and FAQs. It means going a step further, too, like creating foreign-language scripts for your live chat. If you also want to translate your blog posts into different languages, you could consider hiring a freelancer or agency.
To determine which languages you need to adopt, take a look at your analytics and assess where the bulk of your traffic is coming from. In other words, where are the consumers located who are looking to buy the products you sell?
Offer 24/7 Live Chat
Good customer service is everything in the eCommerce world, with businesses in 2021 prioritizing it even above price and products.
Getting your customer service right with international shoppers is more difficult because of the time differences and language barriers. As we saw above, you can solve the latter problem via translation, while overcoming the time difference can be done with 24/7 live chat availability. Be sure to follow best practices, paying attention to the end-user’s experience.
Chatbots, especially those driven by artificial intelligence, ensure that your brand is “always on.” It doesn’t matter where a customer is located in the world or what time of the day or night it is, chatbots allow them to get in touch at any time with their query. The bot is then able to solve their query in double-quick time, which boosts customer service, customer satisfaction, and conversions.
Implement International Shipping Integration
With integrated international shipping, you are able to sell your products to customers all around the world. However, with international shipping comes a whole new set of problems, including taxes, different insurance costs and currency conversions.
All of these things however are necessary and will improve the worldwide customer experience that you offer. Moreover, your eCommerce store will benefit if you allow your customers to pick their own personal shipping information.
The easiest way to do all this is to use a shipping vendor or platform software, such as Easyship, that lets you do all these things, plus which also lets you pick the right courier option that improves your bottom line with their shipping values.
Add More Payment Methods
As your store becomes multilingual, you’ll need to add more payment options. This is essential because it’s often the case that customers arrive on the checkout page, before abandoning their cart. And, as research shows, one of the prime reasons for cart abandonment is the lack of preferred payment options.
There are two steps to take in order to add the right variety of payment methods to your checkout page. The first is to research your audience and find out which countries your traffic is coming from. The second is to then research local buyers’ top payment methods. Once you’ve got this information, you can then start adding payment providers that have a reputation for safety and security.
Localize Your Warehouse Management
In order to make your multilingual eCommerce store as successful and efficient as possible, it’s important that you use local warehouses.
Using local warehouses and fulfillment services will not only speed up the shipping process, thus improving customer satisfaction, it will also slash your operating costs.
Therefore, it’s a good idea to work with several warehouses in the locations where your customers are based across the world. This will also help you to organize your products, boost inventory turnover rates and reduce stress.
Often, the best way to streamline your warehouse management is to work with a 3PL. A 3PL (third-party logistics provider) gives you access to a market where you’re currently not established, which therefore makes them an ideal option for online stores looking to go worldwide.
Final Thoughts
These multilingual essentials will allow you to get your eCommerce store noticed in various countries around the world. First, you need to identify which countries you should be targeting, and then you need to translate your pages, add live chat, localize your warehouse management and add more payment options. This can all be a lot of work, so it’s important to make use of tools and extra workers where possible.
