Following usability guidelines for your eCommerce site are obviously important. Design aspects of your website such as quick downloading, easy navigation and interaction with no ambiguity trigger sales, however selling to foreign markets requires extra consideration. An eCommerce site that only focuses on their target audience in one country cannot exploit the internet’s global reach and many eCommerce sites are losing much overseas business due to the usability of their site to international customers. Foreign consumers may have heard about your site and are able to find it easily but any marketing employed by your business will be wasted if they cannot connect with the content on your site, preferring instead to use a local site. Research has suggested that internet users are four times more likely to purchase from a website that communicates in their own language and over 50% of web users speak a native language other than English so connecting to these non English speaking countries will potentially double your audience and hopefully double your sales!

Localisation refers to designing your website in a way that can be adapted for and is appropriate to international customers. Taking into account language and cultural differences will allow you to communicate with more customers worldwide and increase sales. Applications can be localised to different levels depending on the user group or culture you expect to use your site. You may wish to keep the content of your site the same but translate local measures such as currency or time or you may decide to translate the product text and terminology to suit the appropriate country. Some eCommerce sites even go as far to change colours, images and symbols to suit the target culture as customers perceptions of service quality differ from country to country. For example, The colour red means error, stop or warning in western culture however this isn’t the case for Asian countries. In pursuing a global market, businesses should be sensitive to elements such as this. If you understand their local cultures, how they use technology and their expectations you will most likely be successful in selling to them.

Even simple differences between variants of English can make or break a sale. For example, British English and American English obviously differ with British using shopping basket and Americans preferring shopping cart and spelling variations such as colour and color. Customers who recognize that the site is based abroad will become less trusting of it, hence less likely to purchase from it. This isn’t a case of automatic translation but researching your target markets expectations and customs.

When did you last check your eCommerce site for these issues? Can you get more sales from applying simple changes?

I’ve briefly explained in my first post the reasoning behind setting up our own online shop. For us at carrotmedia it’s going to be a learning experience to make us better at our job. However, we have an alternative motive!

We want to give back to the community something which they can keep and learn from over the coming years as this blog will be ongoing as we will be sharing everything from who is involved, sales figures, marketing techniques, design and usability successes and most importantly any failures we have along the way.

We are by no means sitting in an ivory tower presuming this is going to be 100% success. We understand this is going to be a long process with its trials and tribulations. Eventually we would like to turn this project into a solid foundation for anyone setting up an online shop or store anywhere in the world.

So much of the literature out there is vague with no real facts and figures. Many are quick to judge mistakes as failures when they should be seen as learning experiences. We will be honest and factual about the whole experience in order to create a resource to all online retailers.

What we’d like – We would like to get YOU involved, everyone reading this blog will have a view on what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and what they think in the grand scheme of things. So get in touch, all feedback is good feedback.