How To Localize Your Global Ecommerce Business For Better Conversions

Today, everything has changed dramatically with the internet and the advent of ecommerce. With the emergence of global ecommerce, you can sell to customers from any corner of the planet.

If you already have an online business or are planning to become a global brand, localization is your key to success. Without a solid localization strategy, you can’t even dream about engaging new audiences. Keeping your website, the way it’s not understandable to your target audience seems like a big waste, right? But that’s just one of the reasons why you need localization. 

The rapid expansion of global ecommerce is also pushing the boundaries of online businesses. Localization allows you to expand your reach to new audiences, build credibility at global scale, increase sales, build customer loyalty, and much more.  

Let’s explore how ecommerce localization improves conversions

• Connect With Your Target Customers

• Opens the Door to New Markets

• Personalized Customer Journey 

• Tap Into Local Holiday Revenue Streams

• Better Online Shopping Experience

Well above all, you need more and more customers to grow your business; and why not? If you have an overwhelming urge to become a global ecommerce brand, let’s dive right in and talk about some of the crucial phases of localization of your ecommerce business.

How to localize your global ecommerce business?

1. Establish your business locally

First things first. Establishing your business is the foremost requirement to ensure your further localization and profitability. It is always preferable to enter a new market with a proven business model and the right technology. You can easily go global with the right ecommerce platforms like StoreHippo and expand globally. It helps you to handle multiple vendors, sub stores, track customer geolocation for the promptness of delivery, offer a gamut of marketing tools to target customers in different geographies. All these aspects are very important when you localize your business or create a hyperlocal ecommerce store. StoreHippo ecommerce platform offers an all-in-one solution to go global while staying local. 

2. Pick the target country

Many ecommerce businesses don’t spend enough time educating themselves about global ecommerce trends. They get a vague idea about the countries to which they want to expand, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

If you are planning to localize your global business, it is important to pick the target country or countries because the online shopping behaviour of customers differs dramatically from one market to the other. It is always recommended to research and identify a new target market or country, learn how things work in that market and build strong relationships with people on the ground. Again, relationships are key – find local partners & associates with whom you can associate to localize the content and communication. With StoreHippo, you can easily onboard vendors and partners and have complete control over their products and inventory while allowing them the freedom to upload new products or manage their shipping. This freedom enables vendors to better manage their businesses on your hyperlocal ecommerce store.

3. Find global parcel carriers

As shipping always remains the backbone of ecommerce business, this factor holds utmost importance. And surely, it is harder to ship globally than domestically. Therefore, before you accept a single international order, you need to find global shipping partners, onboard them and manage them. To facilitate this process, you also need to understand the shipping and import related regulations of the target countries. StoreHippo helps you make this task simple with its automated in-built tools for global shipping. It simply automates your shipping process to help you expand globally without any shipping hassles.

4. Know the local sales tax or import duties

Be aware that shipped packages can be held in customs for days, weeks, or even longer. Thus, it is important that your global ecommerce platform has country-based tax settings and compliance. With StoreHippo, you can easily set multi-level taxes based on the local applicable sales tax and import duty-related liabilities for customers in your target country. The platform makes it easier for your customers to check all the customs duty and taxes in the final checkout price. And when customers have high transparency of prices, they are more likely to get converted for sales. It will help you avoid any last-minute, unpleasant surprises for your international customers.

5. Figure out payment methods and multi-currency support

Online payments are the key consideration when you are thinking of a hyperlocal ecommerce business. If you are looking to sell internationally with the localization strategy, the online payment issue is perhaps the biggest blind spot. Merchants assume their customers will pay via credit card, whereas in reality, the customers in the target country may not even have a credit card or may prefer using a different payment method for online purchases.

StoreHippo integrates your online store with third-party providers such as multiple payment gateways companies. It provides multiple payment choices along with COD and wallet support for easy and quick payments. In addition, it allows you to set up payment options based on the geolocation or device used by your customers to support global ecommerce business.

6. Provide a localized online shopping experience

To be able to effectively tap into the global market, a localized online shopping experience to your customers is the primary key. This step has a huge development cost as it will require you to create a dedicated website to offer a website in the customer’s local language, display the products according to local trends and conditions, show pricing in local currency, and more.

How about getting all these things done with a single platform? Yes, StoreHippo does it all. The platform offers built-in functions that allow you to create local chapters of your website for different countries and manage the entire content from a centralized content management system. with powerful inbuilt location and currency detectors, your online store will switch to the native currency based on the IP address of customers, show product pricing in local currency, offer the preferred payment methods in the region, run special marketing campaigns as per local events and holidays, and completely localize your global ecommerce business for better. 

7. Get the language translation right

Do you know that customers are 4 times more likely to buy from a website in their own language? Most of businesses hire specialized translation companies to translate the product catalogues but it is a very costly option. Thus, it’s best to have an ecommerce platform like StoreHippo that supports multilingual features. It helps you to easily translate your store into 100+ different languages. The platform also allows you to adopt a hyperlocal ecommerce strategy by showing the language based on the geography of users or user group or even the device they access from.

Kick start your way to ecommerce business localization with StoreHippo

Now when you know how to localize your online business while supporting your global ecommerce business needs, you need the right localization strategy and a platform to back it up. Remember that even before your business existed, there were brands like L'oreal, Samsung that managed to become a powerful global brand in a far more challenging environment. The fundamentals of building a global brand have not changed much with ecommerce; it is still about localizing the business in the local market. But going hyperlocal is much more competitive in today’s time. So, you need a best-in-class platform like StoreHippo to support your hyperlocal online business.

So, there are enormous opportunities to go global. You just need the right technology and tools to expand your business and increase conversions. StoreHippo ecommerce platform has powered various retail businesses towards growth. Equipped with end-to-end features for building, managing and running your global ecommerce business. You can easily make your ecommerce store available in 100+ languages to target local and global customers in the language they love. It also helps you to boost conversions by offering customized services and quick delivery with location-based settings and extensive support of multiple currencies on your online store.

Nothing can stop you, so go ahead and create a localized experience, make your business global, and watch your revenue stream grow. Start a free 14 days online trial  store to explore all the go-global features of StoreHippo platform.