International expansion is an especially important factor for the growth of sales from your online store.
The latest study on online sales published by SEMrush reported trends in different countries: The e-commerce industry in the United States leads the international market with 42.9% of organic traffic, followed by the United Kingdom (6.7%), Germany (6.2%) and France (4.5%).
Some advantages of the international expansion of your online store:
- You reach users around the world with a single click.
- You multiply your sales by opening up new markets in other countries.
- You raise marketing to the highest level by taking advantage of campaign dates in each of the different countries. You won't just cover Black Friday or Christmas campaigns, as you can sign up to all international promotions to boost your sales.
- You don't rely on a single market to continue growing: by opening up new markets in other countries, you won't be reliant on the situation in your country and you'll receive traffic from all over the world.
- You learn from the competition in other countries and get inspired by observing other stores in your industry to increase your business.
Tailoring your online store to each country
Prior to the international expansion of your online store, there are two very important aspects that you should take into account to tailor your website to the needs of users in different countries:
Language
It’s very important for the user to feel comfortable on the website and be able to shop easily and hassle-free.
To achieve this, you need to translate all website content into the user's mother tongue.
With the progress of technology, new tools such as Glotio have appeared that make translation easier, thereby minimising time and costs while guaranteeing that you can sell in more countries in less time and much more affordably. Users look for stores that give them enough confidence and having your store in their native language is a good way to gain their trust.
Marketing
Make yourself known in the local language, take your marketing one step further and get started with international marketing.
There are many sales channels, such as social media, Google Ads, Marketplace, comparison sites, affiliate networks, email marketing, etc. For all of them you'll need a data source in the language of each country to make the right impact on each market.
Make sure to export your product details into the local language so you don't miss out on sales and to be accepted by many traffic sources that require data feeds in native languages as mandatory.
How to optimise translations and reach users all over the world
The best option for reaching users around the world is to use a translation tool that gets the job done quickly, efficiently and affordably and reducing costs just like GLOTIO, the specialized machine translation tool for PrestaShop, does.
Make sure you meet the following conditions:
- Automation: Automatically translate your entire online store (catalogue, products, categories, attributes, features, manufacturers, suppliers, attachments, etc.)
- International Marketing: Exportable data feed in all languages to start marketing in new countries and multiply your visits.
- SEO: Make sure that the translation respects all the SEO of your preset language, which means that you can start positioning your products organically in each of the countries you decide to sell by using their official language(s).
- Key tools for a perfect translation:
- Find and replace: You can always find a word or string of words that you prefer to replace with another.
- Excluded words: It's very likely that you won't want to translate certain words, such as brands or suppliers.
- Smart dictionary: Nobody knows the products you sell as well as you or your team do, so decide how to translate certain words.
Sales growth
Translating your website into another language and offering your products or services in the country's official language(s) will help you reach out to other types of customers and boost the conversion rate.
Provide your client a website in their language in order to streamline and maximise your product sales. This will boost customer trust and loyalty with your brand, while automatically expanding the sales of your online store.
As an example: imagine that you want to buy some shoes on a website where the product information is in French, but you have lots of doubts and you can't find help in your language anywhere.
The result is that you'll look for that same product on a website that you understand.
People tend to buy what they can understand.
So, make them understand you, make it easy for the user and automatically boost your sales.
