Innovate Your Magento Store with Multilingual Features This Thanksgiving

It is rightly said that "If you describe a person in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you describe him in his language, that goes to his heart". So why not use this strategy in increasing your ecommerce business.

As the season of Thanksgiving is about to come, buyers will be targeting to shop early for the festive sales. According to a survey, "Record 64.7 Million people living in U.S. are not native English speakers". Hence, integrating web store with Magento multilingual extension can be a strong asset and profitable option.

There are many reasons behind it. Firstly, the buyer will get a homely feel on your web store. Secondly, they will understand your products and website content in the depth. Lastly, it will help creating a global presence for your ecommerce store.

Before devoting money on translating and localizing your web content, you should take a step back and consider a few best practices that can save your headaches down the road. Offering the user experience for your multilingual platform as smooth as possible will denote the difference between having your site visitors bounce or retaining them. And, eventually converting them into customers

The following are the best practices that can be followed for creating a multilingual website.

A. Language

This is the most basic thing to catch up. As soon as user lands on website, global landing page that allows the user to select their preferred language first should be popped up. Or else detect the language of your user’s browser should be detected first and then serve up the website in that language right away. Translation should include all content along with navigation buttons, features and functions of the site. Moreover, you should always focus on supporting languages from which you are getting regular user web traffic.

B. Culture

This is one of the most important aspects to be taken into consideration. It is vital for multilingual e-stores to focus on cultural considerations for connecting with users. Therefore, your website should keep equal content related to all the supported cultural languages.

C. Transparent Toggle Button

To keep toggle button for translating language of your e-store is quite essential. Moreover, it is to be kept visible and accessible on every page of your website. User should be able to toggle between various languages without having to return to homepage.

D. Global URL

A global URL strategy is required for marketing and search engine optimization. Keeping your website URL general will allow users from all culture to get connect with it. A website domain can be defined with multiple subdomains if you are doing business in various countries.

E. Online Features and Functionalities

It is necessary for you to make sure that all the other features and functionality of website should be available in multiple languages along with the content. For instance, options like user sharing, product description, printing, subscribing, RSS Feed of your site should be available in all the languages your website supports.

F. Multilingual Search Bar and Review Page

This both are the key part of any e-commerce website. Your website should always support search bar with multiple languages. So that user can search and convert the entered string into the desired language. Additionally, review page is one of the most significant section to increase product sale. So don’t forget to support multilingual review section on your website.

G. Do Not Simply Use Open Source Google Translate

Using open source google translator for converting languages may turn to be trustable as it may be not correct and accurate. Hence, using an advanced option like Magento google translate that integrates Google translate API to convert the store in different Language. It is also advisable to use human resource or automated AI human translation services for achieving perfect multilingual translations for your websites.

H. Multilingual Marketing and Integrated Operations

Last but not the least, your online store should also support multi language marketing and operations. You should offer users with customer support, live chat, email support and marketing materials in all the languages supported by website. Furthermore, you should always perform multilingual offline marketing and SEO strategy. This incorporates multilingual blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts as well as the tracking of results of your multilingual marketing efforts.

Bottom Line

To summarize, it requires efforts to be made in deciding overall strategy and architecture, supporting features, offline infrastructure, social media presence and marketing strategies before getting onto a multilingual website.

Multilingual websites are the future of our online universe. They are possible to get up and running in by using tools like Magento Multilingual extension. Go grab it to optimize your website and achieve more than predicted sales on this Thanksgiving season.

Mr. Maulik Shah is the founder & CEO of AppJetty, a digital software products store specializing in extensions, plugins and apps for host of software platforms like Magento, WordPress, SugarCRM, SuiteCRM, Odoo, Dynamics CRM, etc.