You have created your e-commerce site with Shopify, you have made a great commercial development via SEO, SEA, Facebook ads or other in France and you want to develop internationally? It is an excellent idea ! Indeed, e-commerce does not know physical borders and can therefore be exported more easily than a physical store.
But before going international, you have to translate your Shopify site in the vast majority of cases.
a good translation is above all a well-managed project!
The good news is that you don't need to create a second Shopify site . It is indeed possible to translate the content of an existing site without recreating everything. It's a way to move faster even if it's not perfect. You can read “When to create a new Shopify site to learn more” (article to come).
Why translating your E-commerce is important?
Indeed, as a French-speaking site, you can sell in Belgium, in certain African countries or in Canada, but this involves other constraints such as logistics.
Before exporting across the Atlantic or delivering to French-speaking Africa, many e-tailers try the international adventure in Europe.
Geographical proximity is reassuring and Europe tends to be more and more unified on the regulatory and legislative level.
This therefore allows you to test the internationalization of your e-commerce site in a more serene way.
Translate your Shopify site to export to Europe
But, if Europe tends to unify in many areas, the language spoken by each country is still often unique.
It is therefore necessary to translate your site before going abroad. Only part of Belgium and part of Switzerland can use the French version of your site to place an order. For all other Europeans, it will be necessary to localize content to be able to reach these new potential customers.
What language should you translate your Shopify ecommerce into?
Once your decision to go abroad is made, it is necessary to choose the languages and the pace of translation.
- Are you going to translate the whole site or just part of it?
- What can be a realistic translation and publication schedule?
- What are the essential parts to translate first?
- What are the essentials for European customers?
- How to adapt the legal notices for each country?
- Which language to translate first?
- Should you translate your site into many languages at the same time?
- Do I need one domain name per language? A file ? A subdomain?
- Do the photos require graphic retouching? Do they have content to translate?
So many questions that you need to ask yourself before translating your Shopify site. Unfortunately, there is no universal answer. It is up to you to decide according to your budget and your needs. The more countries you target and the more products you will have, the greater the cost and time of the project.
How to translate your shopify store?
Do you have clear ideas about your translation roadmap? So now, what to do? Do you have to go through a translator? A machine translation tool? Machine learning? One thing is certain, localizing content takes time and know-how. Let's see the different options for translating your site. On the technical side, the good news is that the creators of Shopify have planned everything.
translate yourself
If you have skills in one of the languages of our beautiful continent, don't hesitate. It certainly takes time and skills, but it's the most reliable way to have content that matches your theme if you have a limited budget.
However, pay attention to several things. Translation takes time, a lot of time. So measure the time needed to translate 100, 200, 300 words and try to see the time needed to translate all your content. There's nothing worse than ending up in a half-finished, unworkable translation project.
The advantage of this solution is that it will force you to strongly prioritize the content to be translated.
Go through a professional translator
Going through a translator is a guarantee of reliability but with a certain cost. No need for a certified or sworn translator either. But good knowledge of the language will help avoid false friends and therefore improve the conversion rate of your site in the new language.
Indeed, translation errors can be fatal for the conversion. Nothing is worse for a customer than seeing a text saying the opposite of what he would like.
Use Google Translate
Should you use Google Translate to launch an e-commerce site in a new language. A priori, this seems risky because even if Google has made enormous progress, it remains automatic text. However, this is not a bad idea to test a market or to have content quickly and resume it later.
One of my e-merchant friends, for example, translated his marketplace via Google translation into more than 26 languages to test the markets most receptive to his products.
It had over 100,000 very specialized products and very many small (in population) European countries responded because they simply did not have this offer available in their market.
It's up to you to see if Google translation holds up in your sector and if your customers remain receptive.
Go through Deepl's machine learning
Deepl is a bit like the supercharged version of Google Translate. It certainly pays for large volumes of translation and for automation, but the free version gives you a good overview.
Deepl uses machine learning to constantly improve its translations, so far it's the best automatic translator we've seen at Pikka.
We advise you to test it to get an idea of the translations.
Locate via a hybrid system
Another way is to not put all your eggs in one basket. Indeed, mixing the translation modes according to the importance of the content can allow you to save time, translation cost and flexibility.
Localizing a legal notice text may not have the same importance as translating a small seo text, for example.
Which apps to translate your Shopify site?
There are many translation applications for its Shopify site, it's up to you to make your selection through the app store or ask your favorite shopify agency (us :) ) and we will be happy to support you in internationalization of your e-commerce.
Here is a small selection of shopify applications to translate your site
Langify
Perhaps one of the best-known Shopify location apps. Langify offers 7 days of free trial to test their app.
Langify allows you to use several domain names to manage languages as independent sites, to be able to load information by Excel file, to translate content yourself, etc.
Clearly an app to try if you want to translate your Shopify site.
GTranslate
An application that has a lot of completely free features. Ideal for starters, but the free version will show its limits very quickly. Indeed, if you are interested in the natural referencing of your Shopify site , then you will have to take the paid version.
Gtranslate, on the other hand, will automatically perform the translation with Google Translator and therefore offers more than 103 languages in its application. It's up to you to see if the Google translation content is sufficient or not.
LangShop
LangShop is making a lot of noise right now and offers many interesting functions.
For example, it also offers currency exchange. So it's not really possible with Shopify to change the currencies of an eshop, so it will simply display an automatic calculation but the payment will take place in the currency defined in your Shopify store.
Here's how to translate your Shopify store from A to Z. If you need support or a Shopify expert to help you internationalize your store, you can contact us at 01 84 25 92 21
Have you already translated your Shopify site? How did you do ? Tell us in the comments your e-merchant tips and tricks to save time on localizing a Shopify store.
