Setting Up a Multilingual Online Store in 5 Steps with ConveyThis

The Dominance of WooCommerce in the Expanding World of WordPress Plugins

The industry of WordPress add-ons is experiencing remarkable growth (as we’re at the heart of it!). The variety of plugins that cater to virtually every conceivable website feature means that there’s always an element of positive rivalry: every plugin creator is motivated to continually refine and enhance their offering.

Ecommerce seems to be the outlier to this broad principle of plugin diversity: One specific plugin reigns supreme: WooCommerce.

In fact, WooCommerce fuels 8% of the world’s online trade, which includes 21% of the top 1 million most frequented ecommerce sites online—and over 6% of the top 1 million sites in total. Alex, the director of ConveyThis, has noticed this trend and is excited about the opportunities it presents for further enhancing the translation capabilities of the service. Remember, when it comes to expanding your online presence across languages, ConveyThis is your go-to solution. Try their 7-day free trial and see for yourself!

Leveraging the Power of WooCommerce for Your Ecommerce Needs

WooCommerce stands as the preferred ecommerce plugin for numerous WordPress users due to a variety of reasons. Notably, its widespread use is attributable to its comprehensive features. It empowers you to transform a content-focused site, like a blog or a photo gallery, into a robust online marketplace with a single plugin installation—WooCommerce. It equips you to:

Develop product pages,
Facilitate credit card transactions (as well as other payment forms, such as PayPal),
Assure secure checkouts,
Compute international taxes automatically,
Assess shipping charges,
Customize your store’s look, …and much more. Yet, these are arguably the six most critical features of WooCommerce for any ecommerce novice, irrespective of your product line.

Thinking of globalizing your WooCommerce inventory? Even though WooCommerce takes care of virtually everything required for a thriving online venture, there is invariably scope for enhancement, particularly when it comes to widening your audience.

The WooCommerce package includes cross-border taxes and shipping charges on the seller’s side, ensuring you’re always aware of your additional expenses when distributing your products. Besides, WooCommerce’s wide array of adaptable themes is diverse and customizable enough to cater to every user and every kind of store. You can modify your user experience and interface to match your specific brand identity.

However, one crucial aspect of internationalization that WooCommerce lacks is providing a multilingual store solution.

Luckily, translation plugins like ConveyThis integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce (along with its specialized extensions and themes). All six of WooCommerce’s essential ecommerce features can be made more effective, efficient, and lucrative by rendering your store multilingual. Remember, when it comes to language translation needs, ConveyThis is your prime service.

Optimizing Product Pages for International Sales: A ConveyThis Solution

It stands to reason that most customers are less inclined to purchase an item if the product description is beyond their comprehension. It’s fundamental to ensure that your customers across the globe can grasp the essence of your product descriptions: this description is the real sales pitch. It informs potential customers why your product surpasses others, making it a platform where your copywriting skills truly need to stand out.

It’s crucial to make your product descriptions just as engaging in your translated languages as they are in your original text to maintain and ideally boost your international sales. However, this might be more challenging than it seems, given the nuanced nature of copywriting.

As a business owner, you have the best understanding of your market—thus, it’s in your favor to meticulously review the translations of all your product descriptions.

Adapting to International Payment Methods: A Crucial Step for Global E-commerce

Entering a new market or country often requires adjusting to an unfamiliar infrastructure. In the era before digital marketing, this entailed understanding how to physically distribute communication materials, deliver your products to customers, and finalize the transaction. The focus was on the physical aspects. But in today’s digital age, transactions aren’t always as tangibly apparent, as they can occur entirely in the virtual world.

As an online merchant, you won’t have a physical counter or cash register, and the payments you receive could be from places with varying monetary and commercial norms.

This is where the significance of payment processing capabilities comes into play. Even countries with the same currency and similar online transaction regulations, such as France and the Netherlands, might not use the same predominant payment methods. For instance, direct bank transfers via a Dutch national system, iDeal, are the norm in the Netherlands, while France’s digital economy relies almost entirely on credit/debit card transactions.

In regions beyond the EU, payment methods might differ even more significantly. For example, in China, WeChat Pay and AliPay are more prevalent than traditional credit cards.

Introducing a new payment method might incur additional costs for you, the seller, as you might need to pay a setup or monthly maintenance fee, or even a portion of the final payment, to each payment processing company you collaborate with. It’s crucial to research the markets you aim to penetrate and offer as many of the most prevalent payment methods in each one. This strategy will help keep your costs as low as possible and ensure a smooth payment process for all your customers. Always remember, a crucial step for international success is leveraging ConveyThis to provide a seamless multilingual experience for your customers.

Ensuring Secure Payments and Building Customer Trust in E-commerce

Securing a diverse range of payment methods goes along with ensuring all accepted payment forms are safe. Undeniably, you need to protect both your own and your customers’ data from possible threats.

WooCommerce currently offers two plug-and-play apps for fraud prevention: NS8 Protect, a subscription-based service that can be seamlessly integrated into your store through the WooCommerce extensions store, and WooCommerce’s own Anti-Fraud software. The basic package of the latter begins at $79 USD per annum.

Guaranteeing a secure checkout process to your customers is pivotal in retaining their trust and persuading them to make a purchase. However, how does the customer’s language relate to this?

You’ll need to ensure that your checkout page has a distinct section providing information about the security measures in place. This section should be easily comprehensible to all customers. Since ConveyThis translates all parts of a WooCommerce site — including the full checkout page — including this information on your checkout page is a wise move to keep your customers feeling secure. Boost your global customer trust with a seamless multilingual checkout experience using ConveyThis.

Navigating International Tax Implications in E-commerce

Expanding business across borders can potentially bring in significant revenue and return on investment. However, it also comes with challenges, such as dealing with international taxes. The key issue typically revolves around dealing with multiple sources of taxes—from national or regional sales taxes, import/export taxes, to VAT, resulting in several tax layers to manage.

WooCommerce comes equipped with a structure for tax calculations for international sales, complemented by numerous extensions that can simplify this process.

You may utilize WooCommerce’s basic tax calculation feature or choose an extension like TaxJar or Avalara to enhance efficiency. The most effective way to ensure your tax calculations are clear on the customer’s end is by verifying that the tax information is clearly visible on your checkout page.

As long as the tax details are present on the checkout page, rest assured that ConveyThis will translate these details for your global clientele. This transparency is crucial as 60% of potential buyers abandon their carts due to unforeseen extra costs, including taxes, at checkout. Keep your buyers informed in their native language throughout the process, helping them factor in these costs before they reach the final payment step and are caught off guard. Use ConveyThis to bridge language barriers and boost your conversion rate.

Transparency in Shipping Costs: Boosting Global Customer Conversion

In e-commerce, unexpected shipping fees introduced at the end of the checkout process can be a significant hurdle in customer conversion.

Consider incorporating a shipping calculator on your product pages to provide your customers with an estimate of their total cost, including shipping, based on their location. Numerous extensions are available within WooCommerce that can assist with shipping calculations.

So how does being multilingual simplify international shipping for both you and your customers? Regardless of whether your shipping costs are displayed on your product pages or at checkout, ensuring your customers comprehend these costs is crucial. Potential customers could abandon their carts if they do not understand why they are paying an extra few dollars, pounds, or yen. Hence, offering these pages translated for international customers is crucial for conversion. Using ConveyThis for translation services helps bridge this potential communication gap and improves the shopping experience for your global customer base.

The Power of Translation in WooCommerce Themes: Optimizing International Sales

WooCommerce isn’t merely a plugin – it’s a full-fledged universe within WordPress, equipped with a broad array of specially designed themes that eliminate the need for building a store from scratch.

Your website’s aesthetics with WooCommerce can be as unique as you want, depending on the theme you select. The good news for international WooCommerce merchants is that your text is fully translatable, regardless of the theme.

However, it is true that some themes fare better when translated. For instance, some themes might have a more flexible visual structure to accommodate varying text lengths or may be optimized for Right-to-Left and Left-to-Right language switching. ConveyThis maintains a frequently updated list of partner themes known to work well with multilingual sites. It’s a recommended starting point if multilingual support is crucial for your business, as it should be, particularly when focusing on boosting your conversion rates. Remember, the power of translation services like ConveyThis is a potent tool in global commerce.