Ecommerce is on the rise around the world. Both individuals and companies can create online sites and sell their products without retail storefronts. Studies have shown that eight in ten European internet users perform online purchases through some form of ecommerce storefront. This trend shows no signs of stopping, especially in the younger demographic and millennials. However, online business carries its own share of problems and conundrums to resolve. Even if you implement ecommerce software through a platform like BigCommerce or Magento, you will still have a lot to plan for. International customers are likely to contact you with wishes to buy your products. Even if you implement a multi-currency ecommerce solution like Shopify, the problem is that many people still won’t speak your native language, whatever it may be. Multilingual customer service and user experience (UX) can amend that shortcoming. Let’s take a look at what you can provide for your customers when it comes to multilingual customer support and enhanced UX overall. Benefits of multilingual UX Before we dive into multilingual customer service for ecommerce, let’s take a look at the benefits regarding the process. After all, every upgrade or addition to your site should bear some form of positive outcome. According to CSA Research, 75% of worldwide customers prefer buying online goods through sites with their languages featured as an option. This number is too high to ignore, so let’s take a look at several benefits of implementing multilingual support on your ecommerce website. Better customer engagement Just over 26% of internet transactions on the global level take place in English language. This fact is even more alarming when you take the global number of internet users into account. Providing a multilingual ecommerce storefront will allow for better user engagement globally. People from different corners of the world will be much more likely to use your site to order goods and spread positive word of mouth about your practices. Higher ROI Return on Investment (ROI) is on every ecommerce website owner’s mind – and for good reasons. Hiring professional translators or outsourcing your localization through Pick Writers and their translation services reviews costs money. However, the return on investment connected to the initial expense is tremendous. Mobile ads which lead to online stores fare 86% better if they offer localized marketing content to their readers. No business model will save you from the simple fact that people like to be met halfway when languages are concerned. Good SEO ranking Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a huge role in how your site is perceived through search engines and their algorithms. Google has modified the SEO algorithm to detect and promote websites which offer accessibility and original content above all else. This means that implementing a multilingual approach to your ecommerce will lead to resounding success, especially if you pursue more global languages such as Chinese, Russian and German. Multilingual customer service in ecommerce As with any addition to an ecommerce website, multilingual support should come in stages. Let’s take a detailed look at how you can implement multilingual customer service into an existing, live ecommerce website. 1. Research popular languages and demand Every industry has a certain target demographic which makes it tick. The same goes for children’s toys, books, car equipment or anything else. In order to pinpoint the perfect languages for your website, you should take a look at supply and demand in the industry. Scour through popular competition and their websites. Ask your existing customers about their preferred language offering through email surveys. Do anything you can to eliminate unnecessary languages and add any which might be out of the usual plethora of French, Italian, German and Spanish. 2. Work with an international shipping company Since you plan on expanding into international waters, you should look for shipping companies which can meet your clientele’s demands. International shipping companies come in two varieties; some focus on sea transportation while others (more commonly) prefer air shipping. Look for the best international shipping options in your country and see if you can settle for a mutually-beneficial contract. After all, there is no point in shipping internationally if you don’t break even at the end. 3. Site translation and localization As we’ve mentioned before, site localization should be done in-house or outsourced to a professional translation service. Outsourcing is especially viable if you intend to offer multilingual support in numerous languages not only in content but customer support as well. Add new languages in waves and don’t overreach. You have all the time in the world to slowly and methodically add languages one by one and gauge the public interest in doing so. [subscribe] 4. Machine-learning chatbots In the early days of your website’s multilingual customer service, you can rely on chatbots to get things done. Chatbots are AI algorithms designed to provide rudimentary customer support and learn as they go along. Some of the better quality chatbot algorithms can be found in the app stores for platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce and Magento. These prolific ecommerce support websites also offer numerous plugins which can make the transition into multilingual services much easier and user-friendly. 5. Hire or outsource support agents There will always come a moment where your chatbots won’t be able to deliver on their promises. This is especially possible in their early days, while they are still unaware of the customers’ patterns on your website. In order to offer full customer service despite this shortcoming, you can hire full-time agents or virtual assistants to act as support agents. With some rudimentary training, these employees and freelancers can help you deliver multilingual customer service without you personally speaking the languages. 6. Ongoing product description support Multilingual customer service is a long-term commitment. Each product you publish on your ecommerce website will have to be updated with corresponding descriptions and texts in each language. This raises the question of whether you should hire full-time translators or stick to on-demand freelancers. Make the choice that works best for the volume of products you intend to publish. 7. Create and emphasize feedback channels Ecommerce or not, you will want to talk to your customers on a constant basis. Create dedicated a dedicated email address for feedback and comments. Collect data from your chatbots and have human support agents go through them. Gather feedback constantly, and make sure that your customers know that every bit of criticism is welcome. That way, you will always have an insight into how well you are doing your job. You will also know whether or not you should refocus your multilingual customer service efforts one way or another. Conclusion Whether you opt for DIY localization or assisted ecommerce development with a platform such as Shopify, you should always do it on demand. Never assume that a language is necessary on your website by hunch alone. Add new language support options on a constant basis but back those actions up with research and feedback as you go. Only then will you strike the perfect cord with your audience and find a middle ground that works for both parties. This is a guest post by Kristin Savage, a freelance writer with a special interest in how the latest achievements in media and technology can help to grow readership and revenue. You can find her on Facebook and Medium.

Today PwC's retail survey found the British high street is being reshaped as shoppers shift online - especially in fashion, where a net 100 high street stores closed. This misses the positive side of the story: all those shoppers are buying from independent UK brands online instead, which is one of the fastest growing area of the UK economy. We looked at 30 mid-sized online fashion retailers (with average sales of £1m per month) who get a majority of their traffic from the UK. This collection had grown their sales by an aggregate 21% from October 2017 to October 2018 (year on year). Fashion shoppers love to browse unique designs on Instagram and Pinterest, compare prices and get easy home deliveries. Independent ecommerce brands are bringing original designs to the British wardrobe, and we should celebrate their success.   Behind the research Littledata gathers benchmark data from Google Analytics on over 12,000 websites, including many types of ecommerce businesses. Our customers get insights into their performance and recommendations on how to improve online conversion. [subscribe]

We often receive questions about what customers get when they upgrade from the free version of Google Analytics to Google Analytics 360. The quick answer is that you get a lot - the possibilities are literally endless - as long as you're a big, data-driven company willing to put energy into customer engagement and marketing. Google emphasises that their enterprise analytics are designed to help large companies, like major ecommerce sites, create better customer experiences. But what does that mean in practice? There are a lot of details to understand if you're thinking of transitioning to the big paid version of Google Analytics. The main differences lie in how each product deals with the volume of data and integrations that they have available by default. I've broken those differences down into three categories: Data Collection, Data Sampling and Data Sources. Data collection In short, Google Analytics 360 allows for a faster, smarter, larger data collection. With unlimited hits per month and up to 200 custom dimensions per web property. Features Google Analytics (free) 360 Suite (paid) Hits per Month up to 10M unlimited Custom Dimensions/Metrics 20 Per Property 200 Per Property Calculated Metrics 5 Per View 50 Per View Properties per Account 50 50+ Views per Property 25 25+ Roll-Up Properties No Yes Data Freshness 24 – 48 hours 4 Hours [subscribe] Data sampling and limits As your web traffic grows, Analytics 360 lets you get more out of both sampled and unsampled data sets. Compared with the standard version of GA, you get better reporting on large amounts of data. Understanding how data is sampled in Google Analytics will help you scale the smart way. Features Google Analytics (free) 360 Suite (paid) Report Row Limit per Day Yes Yes Standard Reports Pre-Aggregated 50K 75K Sampling in Ad-Hoc Reports 500K Sessions per Property 100M Sessions per Property Custom Tables No 100 Custom Table Report Row Limit per Day No 1M Rows Unsampled Reports No Yes Unsampled Report Row Limit No 3M (for download) Data sources The 360 Suite makes it especially easy to pull in data from a wide range of advertising platforms and sources, including non-Google products like Salesforce. For some of our enterprise customers, especially large ecommerce sites with a focus on PPC lead gen and retargeting, the ability to seamlessly integrate with DoubleClick is itself enough to make their 360-buy worthwhile! Features Google Analytics (free) 360 Suite (paid) AdWords Yes Yes AdSense Yes Yes DoubleClick Campaign Manager No Yes DoubleClick Bid Manager No Yes DoubleClick For Publishers No Yes Custom Data Sources Yes Yes Query-Time Data Import No Yes Salesforce No Yes BigQuery No Yes   Additional perks (GTM 360, beta testing) In addition to the above benefits, being able to connect Google Analytics to other Google 360 Solutions like Google Optimize 360 and Google Tag Manager 360 is a big plus. As an added perk, Analytics 360 clients often get early access to beta programs for testing and product feedback -- getting directly involved with product development to suit their needs -- plus first-hand support from Google. Google 360 can be purchased directly from Google or through a sales partner. We don't currently sell the 360 Suite ourselves, but we’ve been a certified Google Analytics Service Partner since 2015, including Google Tag Manager and Google Optimize certification, and have extensive experience with custom tagging and reporting. Plus, we built the Littledata app around those analytics best-practices. Our larger consulting clients get the most benefits out of our enterprise plans, which include automated analytics audits, unlimited access to app features, custom setup and reporting, and a dedicated account manager to help ensure deep, accurate tracking. Whether or not you've already upgraded to Google Analytics 360, we highly recommend getting in touch to make sure you're able to use this powerful tool to its full potential!

The results are in, and this year's Black Friday sales prove that things are continuing to look up for ecommerce. Across 570 online stores, the average store did 2.4 times their normal sales in Black Friday week 2017, compared with only 2.2 times in 2016 – and a greater proportion of stores participated in the sales. Following our post on pre-Black Friday trends, Littledata looked again at what happened from Thanksgiving Thursday 2017 through to the following Wednesday (the week including Black Friday and Cyber Monday) – versus a control period of November & December in 2016. Compared with 2016, we found a bigger number of stores participating in Black Friday sales this year: 53% of stores were trading more than 1.5 times their normal volumes, compared with only 49% in the equivalent week in 2016. [subscribe] For those stores which promoted heavily in 2016, the median boost was 2.5 times normal. And those in the bottom quartile of sales in 2016 still traded 108% their normal volumes. How did Black Friday promotions work for your store? Use our industry benchmarks to find out how your online store is performing against the competition.

Many businesses spend a disproportionate amount of time tweaking copy, design and interactive content for their homepage. Yet they miss the fact that the action is increasingly elsewhere. Homepage traffic has traditionally been seen as a proxy for ‘brand’ searches – especially when the actual search terms driving traffic are ‘not provided’. Now, brand search traffic may be finding other landing pages directly. Our hypothesis was that over the last 2 years the number of visits which start at the homepage, on the average website, are decreasing. To prove this, we looked at two categories of websites in Littledata’s website benchmarks: Websites with more than 20,000 monthly visits and more than 60% organic traffic (227 websites) Large websites with more than 500,000 monthly visits (165 websites) In both categories, we found that the proportion of visits which landed on the homepage was decreasing: by 8% annually for the smaller sites (from 16% of total visits to 13% over two years), and 7% annually for the larger sites (from 13% to 11%). If we ignore the slight rise in homepage traffic over the November/December period (presumably caused by more brand searches in the Christmas buying season), the annual decline is more than 10%. From the larger websites, only 20% showed any proportionate increase in homepage traffic over the 2 years – and those were mainly websites that were growing rapidly, and with an increasing brand. I think there are three different effects going on here: Increased sophistication of Google search usage is leading to more long-tail keywords, where users want a very specific answer to a question – usually not given on your homepage. The increase in mobile browsing, combined with the frustrations of mobile navigation, is leading more users to use search over navigation – and bypass your homepage That Google’s search-engine result page (SERP) changes have made it less likely that brand searches (searching for your company or product names) will navigate to your landing page – and instead browse social profiles, news, videos or even local listings for your company. In conclusion, it seems that for many businesses the homepage is an increasing irrelevance to the online marketing effort. Spend some time on your other content-rich, keyword-laden landing pages instead! And would you like to see if you are overly reliant on your homepage traffic, compared with similar websites? Try Littledata’s reporting suite.   Get Social! Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and keep up-to-date with our Google Analytics insights.

The biggest day for online retail sales among Littledata’s clients is the Sunday after Black Friday, followed closely by the last Sunday before Christmas. Which is more important - Black Friday or Cyber Monday? Cyber Monday saw the biggest year-on-year increase in daily sales, across 84 surveyed retailers from the UK and US. In fact, Cyber Monday is blurring into the Black Friday weekend phenomenon – as shoppers get used to discounts being available for longer. We predict that this trend will continue for 2016, with the number of sales days extending before and after Black Friday. Interested in what 2016 will bring? Stay tuned for our upcoming blog post! Want to see how you did against the benchmark? Sign up for a free trial or get in touch if you have any questions!   Get Social! Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and keep up-to-date with our Google Analytics insights.

Shoppers on Black Friday are becoming more selective – with a decrease in the number of retailers seeing an uplift in Black Friday sales, but an increase in the purchase volumes seen at those selected stores. Littledata looked at the traffic and online sales of 84 ecommerce websites* over the Black Friday weekend (four days from Friday to the following Monday), compared with the rest of the Christmas season (1st November to 31st December). 63% of the surveyed retailers saw a relative increase in traffic on Black Friday weekend 2015 versus the remainder of the season, compared with 75% of the same retailers seeing traffic rise on Black Friday 2014. This implies some decided to opt out of Black Friday discounting in 2015 or got less attention for their discounts as other retailers spent more on promotion. The same proportion of retailers (60% of those surveyed) also saw a doubling (on average) in ecommerce conversion rate** during Black Friday 2015. In 2014, over 75% of retailers saw an improved conversion rate during Black Friday, but the median improvement over the rest of the season was just 50%. 61% of websites also saw an increase in average order value of 16% during Black Friday 2015, compared with only 53% seeing order values increase the previous Black Friday. We predict that this trend will continue in 2016, with a smaller number of websites benefiting from Black Friday sales, but a greater increase in ecommerce conversion rate for a select few. Be sure to check back for what the actual trends will be for 2016! Let us know what you think below or get in touch! * The surveyed websites were a random sample from a group which got a majority of their traffic from the UK or the US. The data was collected from Google Analytics, and so represents real traffic and payments. ** The number of purchases divided by the total number of user sessions   Image credit: HotUKDeals   Get Social! Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and keep up-to-date with our Google Analytics insights.

UK-based websites are 5 percentage points better than their US peers at keeping mobile users engaged (with a lower bounce rate), and 2.5 percentage points better at keeping the users from desktop / laptop computers engaged. For bounce rate from email marketing, the difference was also 5 percentage points (a 14% better performance from UK websites). The comparison is based on the Google Analytics data from 209 UK companies and 95 US companies collated by Littledata. The British web industry has benefited from earlier smartphone adoption in the UK (81% vs 75% in the US; source: MarketingLand), and overall greater internet usage from UK consumers (source: Econsultancy). That should put UK-based developers in a great position to sell their experience to other countries with increasing internet adoption An example is MADE.com, a London-based furniture retailer which has used superior online customer acquisition to drive growth across the UK and continental Europe. Littledata founder, Edward Upton, explains: “It’s usually hard to get a hold of industry data to compare digital product performance against similar companies, but Littledata’s benchmarks provide a simple way for companies to find website features that are underperforming.” If your website beats those benchmarks that should not stop you improving. Whilst it’s great to know you’re doing well in a particular area, there are many comparative metrics you can check with our benchmarks to fully understand your performance overall. If your site is struggling with engaging users, then check out our suggestions on improving your bounce rate . Want to know how your site performs? Head over to Littledata Benchmark page and click 'Benchmark your site' to check your performance against others. How Littledata benchmarks work? We gather data from thousands of Google Analytics profiles, and anonymise them in a series of benchmarks, to give insight into how your marketing efforts are paying off. With this benchmark data, you can stop being in the dark about how your website performs and sign up to see how your site compares. Our customers also receive daily insight into site or app performance with our actionable trends reports. You can explore these and other benchmarks via Littledata Benchmark index page.   How would you use benchmarks in your daily work? Leave your comments below.