The shop sells well at home, and orders from abroad started on their own: a parcel to Austria, a customer writing in French, visitors from Spain every week in the analytics. So you switch on the translation app, add a language selector and wait. Weeks later the multilingual ecommerce website has visitors in the new language and almost no orders from them, and the inbox is full of questions the site was supposed to answer: how much is delivery, can I pay the way I am used to, is the price with tax.
The usual conclusion is that the market is not ready or the translation is poor. Sometimes. More often the shop was translated but not localised: the words changed, and everything a buyer needs to trust a foreign shop stayed as it was at home. The causes are few, and all of them show up when you order from your own shop as a customer from that country.
Why a multilingual ecommerce website gets visitors but no orders abroad
The words are translated, the offer is not. Machine translation swaps the language of the product pages, but the price is still in the home currency, delivery times are written for the home market, and sizes, units and dates are yours. A buyer converts the price in their head, guesses at the delivery cost and leaves. The sign: a visitor from the new market opens several pages, reaches the basket or the delivery step and disappears.
The checkout speaks a different language than the shop. The catalogue is translated, but the checkout, confirmation emails, error messages and payment page come from the platform or a plugin and stayed in the home language. The sign: the drop happens at the address form or the payment step, and support gets questions about what a field means.
The payment and delivery options are the home ones. Each market has its habits: card in one country, bank transfer or invoice in another, cash on delivery in a third, a wallet or parcel-locker network everyone uses. If none of the buyer’s usual options appears, the shop looks foreign in the sense that matters: risky. The sign: baskets are full, payments are not started.
Search engines cannot tell which page is for whom. A translated page without the right language tags is shown to the wrong country, or not at all, or two versions of the same product compete with each other. And product titles translated word for word are not the words people search for in that market. The sign: the new language gets its visitors from the language selector rather than from search, or search sends the new country to the home-language pages.
The legal and trust signals are missing. Terms, returns, imprint and cookie notice are in the home language or missing for the new market, the reviews are all in one language, there is no local contact of any kind. A buyer who cannot read how to return a parcel does not send money to a shop abroad. The sign: the delivery and terms pages get visits in the new language, and the visit ends there.
How to tell which one is yours
Everything below takes an evening and needs a phone, a laptop, your analytics and one test order. The first check that fails is usually your cause.
- Buy something from your own shop as a customer from that country. Use a VPN or ask a contact there; go from search to product to checkout, pay with a real card, then cancel. Write down every screen in the home language, every price not in the local currency and every question you answered by guessing.
- Read the confirmation email and the delivery notification from the test order. These are forgotten most often: they come from a template nobody translated.
- Open the analytics and filter by the new country. See where the visits come from (search, ads, direct, the language selector) and on which step they end. A cliff at delivery and a cliff at payment point at different causes.
- Check the language tags. Open the page source of a translated product page and look for the alternate language links in the head; every version should list all the others and itself. If they are missing or all point to the home page, search cannot know which page is for which market.
- Search for your product in the new language the way a local would and see whether your page appears and which version. Then compare the titles local shops use with your translated ones.
- Read the terms, delivery and returns pages in the new language as if you were about to send money to a stranger. Anything missing or machine-sounding is a cause.
- List the payment and delivery options at checkout and ask one person from that market which they use. Their answer is the diagnosis.
The fix, in order
Cheapest first. In our experience the first four steps recover most lost orders before anyone talks about a separate shop.
- Localise the numbers before the words. Show prices in the local currency with tax the way that market expects, convert units and sizes, and put delivery times and costs for that country on the product page, not only at checkout. On most platforms this is a setting, not development.
- Translate the whole path, not just the catalogue. Checkout, address form in the field order of that country, error messages, email templates, invoice, delivery notification, cookie banner, account area. Make the list from your test order and go through it once.
- Add the payment and delivery options that market uses. One local payment method and one local carrier or parcel-locker network change how foreign the shop feels more than any design work. Ask your platform which providers cover that country; most connect through settings.
- Have the legal and trust pages translated by a person. Terms, returns, delivery, imprint and privacy are read at the moment of doubt, and a machine-sounding sentence there costs the order. Add a local contact channel, even just an email answered in that language, and collect reviews from that market.
- Fix how the versions are addressed. Choose one structure, a language folder, a country folder or a separate domain, and keep it; give every page its alternate language tags, a canonical to itself and a language attribute. This is where our SEO work usually starts on a multilingual store.
- Rewrite product titles and category names in the words of that market. Translation gives correct words; your own shop’s search box and the suggestions in the local search engine give the words people use. Categories and best sellers first, the long tail later.
- Decide the shop structure once the market has proved itself. One catalogue with markets and languages is enough for most shops for a long time; a separate storefront per country comes when tax, stock or assortment really differ. In our website and online shop projects this decision is made after the first market has orders, not before.
Two things run alongside. Questions from the new market should land in one place with the country marked: that is where our CRM and analytics projects begin on a shop, so that a support question in Spanish and an order from Spain are one story. And if the new market says the shop is slow, that is usually distance to the server, covered in why a website is slow and what to fix first.
What to measure
- Orders from the new country divided by visits from it, monthly, next to the same ratio at home; the gap is your localisation debt.
- The step where visitors from that market leave, before and after each fix; the cliff should move later and flatten.
- Search visits that land on the correct language version, from the analytics, a few weeks after the language tags are fixed.
- Support questions from that market by topic, which should thin out as each fix lands.
Where we come in
An owner with an evening, a test card and a contact in the new market can find the cause, and platform settings do most of the first fixes. What we add is the order: numbers, path, payment, trust pages, then search, then structure, and the habit of testing the shop as a foreign customer after every change. If you would rather hand over the check, a short brief with the shop address and the target country is enough.
