Unlocking Global Opportunities: The Power of Localization in Shopify

By Luis Vicente Cantero

Expanding your online business globally offers immense opportunities. Just with a few clicks and spending some time, you can make your products available in a specific country. However, it's not as simple as it seems. Internationalization alone isn't enough to increase your global sales; true success lies in localization.

When it comes to expanding your online business, understanding the differences between internationalization and localization is crucial. Internationalization serves as a common strategy for D2C brands looking to scale by targeting new countries and customers, especially when local market efficiencies are stagnant.

On the other hand, localization is the key to making your store accessible and appealing to locals in new markets. This comprehensive process includes translating content, adapting it to the local culture, adjusting layouts for different languages, establishing international domains, and customizing every step of the customer journey. By prioritizing localization, you can create a tailored experience that resonates with customers in your target markets.

You can’t get your brand's full market share potential without localising your shopping experience. Products, content, logistics, currency and pricing, shouldn’t be the same for all your customers worldwide.

In this article, we will explore how to enhance your Shopify Internationalization strategy. You'll gain insights on when and how to effectively achieve localization in your Shopify store, enabling you to sell like a native. Let's see it!

Some Striking Stats About Localization

Do you still have doubts about the advantages of localization? Allow us to present compelling statistics that will undoubtedly convince you to prioritize its implementation:

92% of international visitors want to browse and buy in their own currency and prices. (Source: Shopify)
Localising a store can increase its visibility in search engines by up to 30%. (Source: Shopify)
Localising a store can lead to a 30% increase in conversion rates. (Source: Common Sense Advisory)
Localising a store can increase its average order value by 20%. (Source: Common Sense Advisory)

Top Benefits of Localizing Your Shopify Store

But let's explore more in detail the exciting possibilities and discover how localizing your Shopify store can be a game-changer for your business.

Increasing International Conversion Rates

A well-executed localized experience strategy can significantly enhance conversions. It involves more than just language; it encompasses tailoring the message to resonate with the target audience. By adapting the message to cultural nuances, you can further bolster your conversion rate.

For instance, consider a scenario where you have a French customer. By showcasing content relevant to their home country in French, such as localized calendar events, product images, and pricing, you can instill a sense of trust and familiarity. This localization effort creates an impression that they are purchasing from a local brand, enabling your business to compete effectively with local competitors and ultimately elevate your conversion rate in that specific country.

Scale Your Business

Decrease your Costs

It's crucial to recognize that a product's performance in one market does not dictate its success in another.

Through the strategic customization of products and messaging for specific regions or demographics, retailers can effectively reduce costs associated with excess inventory and returns, all while nurturing customer loyalty. For example, a clothing retailer that observes low sales of a specific shirt in France may discover that the same shirt becomes a popular trend in the US market, thereby mitigating the financial impact of excess inventory.

Adapt your Prices

As a business, you may have been hesitant to maintain uniform pricing for a product across different markets. However, it's important to recognize that each market operates under distinct dynamics in terms of competition and taxation. Consequently, pricing a product uniformly across multiple markets may not be the most optimal strategy.

By embracing a localized experience, merchants can set different prices for each market they serve, enabling them to preserve or even enhance their unit margin.

Grow your Recurring Rate

Acquiring a new buyer can cost anywhere from 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one. By offering a localized experience, you can foster loyalty and enhance the lifetime value of your customers.

For instance, when our aforementioned French customer encounters any issues or has post-purchase questions, providing support in their native language makes them appreciative, ultimately elevating their satisfaction levels.

As you enhance customer loyalty, you'll experience increased sales and benefit from positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

Boost your cross-border traffic

SEO

Search engines are more likely to show your store to users who search in their language. Therefore, as more information we provide to search crawlers, the better our search engine optimisation will be.

When you set up international experiences, you can add a unique web address or URL for each market where you want to offer a localised shopping experience. So if you’re opening a cross-sale market in France, you can create a subfolder to host this experience, such as “mystore.com/fr-fr”. As Google or another feed crawler will also be able to read these localised versions of your pages, your website rank will increase for users of this country.

Social media

Customers are more likely to trust a store tailored to their location and language. With these new localised experiences, you can create a new social media account for those markets. In each of these new accounts, you can attach your unique URL of those countries, so customers go directly to their home country experience.

Furthermore, your paid media ads specialists can create localised campaigns using these links. It will improve the customer experience and give you more insights into your ad campaigns based on their country of origin.

Is Your Brand Prepared to Embark on Cross-Border Localization?

Prior to embarking on the localization of shopping experiences, it is essential to assess your business readiness. Are you prepared to venture into new cross-border experiences? It's important to consider the operational and time commitments each new experience will demand from your team. Therefore, it is crucial to carefully evaluate this decision before proceeding.

Now, let's explore the key metrics that can help you determine your readiness. You should aim to meet at least one of the following criteria:

Your primary/local market is doing more than seven figures annually
You have a cross-border country that makes more than 10% of all your international sales volume.
There is a country that has 1.5X AOV (Average Order Value) higher than your primary market.
There is a country with a 2X conversion rate higher than any other country.

Obviously, it is possible to commence localizing shopping experiences earlier on, but it is important to bear in mind that, at this stage, there is still significant work to be done within your primary market.

FAQ

How can I localize experiences in Shopify?

Now that you are ready to start localizing shopping experiences on Shopify and have determined your target localization areas, you must know there are two different approaches to initiate localization efforts:

Using Shopify Markets.
Create different Shopify Expansion Stores for each of these markets.

Both options allow you to tailor the content and pricing for each local experience. However, each of them has its advantages and disadvantages, and many brands decide to mix both in their localization strategy.

If you want to learn more about this, we suggest reading this other article in our blog.

How can I redirect the customers to the correct shopping experience?

So, you have invested a large amount of money in localizing shopping experiences and have different products, prices, currencies, languages, and even landing pages for different markets. At this point, you wonder how you can ensure your customers land in the right place.

That's where Orbe comes in. Orbe redirects your customers to the right shopping experience based on their location and preferences and boosts your international conversion rate. It automatically integrates with your Shopify Markets and connects multiple expansion stores to recommend to your customers the version of your store that corresponds to their IP address and browser language. It offers customization options, is SEO-friendly, compliant with data protection laws, and maintains attribution parameters of your marketing campaign during redirects.

In addition to Orbe, there are other geolocation Shopify apps available. If you're interested in comparing their features and understanding how they work, we invite you to continue reading our blog article dedicated to this topic. It provides a detailed comparison that will help you make an informed choice.

How can I translate my content?

In the Shopify App Store, you can explore a variety of apps designed to facilitate the translation of your store into multiple languages. However, it's important to note that not all of these apps are compatible with Shopify Markets.

To make the process easier for you, we recommend utilizing Translate & Adapt, a native app developed specifically for Shopify. Additionally, you can also consider using Langify or Transcy, both of which are reliable options for translating your store effectively.

How can I set up currency and pricing for international customers?

If you have multiple Shopify Stores, you can continue managing your products and prices conveniently through the main menu of your Shopify Store, just as you have always done.

For Shopify Markets users, you have the flexibility to personalize your products and prices for each available market directly from the Markets settings.

What payment options should I offer for different sales regions?

In addition to the standard payment methods available in each store, such as Shopify Payments for credit card payments, Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Paypal Express, we strongly recommend considering the inclusion of other local payment methods. These local methods not only enhance trust but also cater to the preferences of the local customers, thereby boosting your conversion rates in those countries.

How do I handle shipping and taxes when selling internationally?

Within Shopify Markets, you have the ability to enable multiple shipping methods and collect specific taxes and duties for each market. For more detailed information on these features, we recommend referring to the Shopify Help Center.

We hope this article has provided valuable insights into localization at Shopify. If you're eager to continue expanding your knowledge on internationalization within Shopify, we highly recommend exploring other informative pieces available in this blog.