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Why Ecommerce Translation Is Important

Oli Kashti - Writer and Fact-Checker for Fast Simon
By Oli Kashti

Published December 4, 2024.

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If you want your eCommerce brand to expand its network across different countries and regions, or strengthen its place in a familiar market, translation services are necessary to grow. Many eCommerce businesses are hiring expert translators to regionalize their marketing campaigns. After all, shoppers are more likely to buy products marketed in their own language. Let’s take a closer look at why eCommerce translations are so important.

What is eCommerce Translation?

Ecommerce translation is a language service that translates pages, content and all resources for online retailers. This can include the website itself, marketing strategies and overall online footprint. 

Some examples of eCommerce translation are:

Making sure that visitors are having their needs met in the language familiar to them can make all the difference. It doesn’t matter how optimized your site is if many shoppers are unable to understand the content.

The solution? You need an effective marketing strategy for each target market. This requires ongoing translation for all your in-store content.

Benefits Of Ecommerce Translation

Grow Your Customer Base

The more languages your store communicates in, the more shoppers you can reach. The more shoppers you reach, the more sales you are bound to make as a result. Increasing customer base once yours has done well locally is the next obvious step. Especially if your competitors aren’t using translation services, this can give your store the edge. 

With translation services, countries where English isn’t the first language can benefit from your content. This is a sure fire way to grow your customer base.

Improve Relatability

In an increasingly globalized world, the retail industry spans all across different countries. Having your brand accessible in different countries and languages gives your brand a global presence. If you are known globally, you are a point of relatability. It’s something that people can bound over, and strengthens your brand image hugely.

Some of the most popular languages to do this in are:

  • Chinese
  • Spanish
  • Arabic
  • Japanese
  • Portuguese
  • French
  • Russian

These are some of the most popular spoken languages in the world. For this reason, your brand’s relatability will increase if these languages are translated well. 

In order to make sure this is achieved, you should make sure that you aim for product localization rather than standard translation. This means that the text isn’t just grammatically accurate, but also naturally phrased as people will understand. This shows the local culture that you understand, and are up to date with the current trends and language culture.

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SEO Visibility

If your eCommerce store is available in multiple languages, this increases your search engine visibility. If more users are able to find your store via search engine, this will increase customer traffic and ultimately sales. So this is no small benefit; this can actually make all the difference. 

Having SEO content and marketing in multiple languages just increases your SERP index and website ranking. Through using a translation app, if all of the data on your website is translated well, your SEO ranking will improve.

More Conversions

If your website is in a language that isn’t native to shoppers, there’s a high chance they will just leave. If they aren’t familiar with English they won’t want to invest time trying to understand what your website is saying. Increased bounce rates mean lower conversions.

If they can understand your website, naturally they will stay. They will browse, get to know your brand. Maybe they will return and tell a friend, and they are much more likely to make conversions. After all, the content will actually be working.

Stand Out

By offering a website in multiple languages, you’re showing shoppers that you care about them. You don’t just care about the English speaking countries; you want all shoppers to be able to enjoy the benefits of your store wherever they are. 

Shoppers will appreciate this, as they know that translation means the merchant has invested in this. It requires effort from the merchant, which doesn’t go unnoticed by the shoppers. They are more likely to spend money in a business they know values them. It also increases the chance of them becoming lifetime customers.

Boosts Authenticity

Lastly, if shoppers see that you have invested in creating multiple languages versions of their website, it boosts your credibility. It shows that you have a global business, where the proof is in the pudding. It helps to increase trust, and people are more likely to purchase from you for this reason.

There are many reasons to use translation services on your website. It boosts credibility, conversions and customer satisfaction. It shows your shoppers that you take them seriously. From a merchant perspective it puts you ahead of the competition by reaching out globally.

In many cases the market is saturated, offering different languages makes you stand out. Build new customers and expand across new markets by translating your store into different languages.