Introduction
In today’s interconnected world, the ability to expand your brand globally is an exciting opportunity for any merchant. However, going international comes with its own set of challenges, particularly when it comes to providing localized shopping experiences. Recognizing this need, BigCommerce, a leading e-commerce platform, has taken a giant leap forward by empowering merchants to grow their international business through localized shopping experiences.
BigCommerce’s localization features
BigCommerce understands that successful global expansion requires more than just translating your website into different languages. It requires tailoring the entire shopping experience to meet the preferences, expectations, and cultural nuances of diverse markets. With this in mind, BigCommerce has introduced a range of localization features – as part of its multi storefront rollout – to help merchants effectively reach and engage customers worldwide.
“Language, currency and cultural differences should not be barriers to commerce, and now they don’t have to be”—Troy Cox, senior vice president of product at BigCommerce
Multilingual Capabilities
BigCommerce allows merchants to easily create multilingual storefronts, presenting product information, checkout processes, and customer support in their preferred language. By removing language barriers, merchants can boost customer trust and engagement, leading to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
Currency localization
Transacting with an international brand often involves currency conversions, which can be complex and confusing for customers. To alleviate this challenge, BigCommerce offers currency localization, allowing merchants to display product prices and complete transactions in the local currency of each customer. This eliminates any uncertainty associated with pricing, making it easier for customers to make purchase decisions.
Local inventory and shipping options
Many logistics companies can offer global shipping, but international brand also need to deal with inventory across multiple locations.. BigCommerce equips merchants with the ability to offer region-specific inventory and shipping options that cater to the experience and preferences of different markets or customers. This capability will likely help merchants optimize their shipping strategies and deliver orders faster.
More personalized content and experiences
Littledata already supports multi-store front on BigCommerce. With the expansion of capabilities to adjust URLs for SEO and localize product pages for each BigCommerce storefront it becomes harder to compare data globally. Luckily with an app like Littledata it is simple to group up sales of the same product and category globally, while splitting out marketing performance and landing pages for each local storefront.
How does this compare to Shopify Markets?
Shopify launched Shopify Markets earlier in 2022 to alleviate the challenge for brands trading internationally – who had previously had to maintain multiple country stores to deal with different regions. Shopify Markets has lots of local customisations – from price rules to product selection – but some of the brands i’ve talked to complained of high currency transaction fees. I’m not sure how BigCommerce’s currency fees compare.
Shopify has allowed multi-currency and multi-lingual trading for a while, but where BigCommerce multi-store front excels is the ability to customise URL and product tags for local language (and therefore local SEO).
Conclusion
With more attention being paid to multi-store fronts and global selling with localized features to support these merchants we can expect it to give a competitive advantage to brands, increase conversion rates by reducing barriers to checkout, and increase the reach of brands excited to sell their products internationally but lacking the resources. As a preferred partner of BigCommerce we are excited for more updates like this to come through the next half of the year.
About Littledata: Littledata was one of the first apps to be approved as Multi-Storefront Compatible by the BigCommerce team. While BigCommerce makes it easy to manage these stores all in one place it can be difficult to track the data correctly. Littledata fixes these issues automatically, gathering accurate data from all of your storefronts and sending it directly to Google Analytics 4 property.
