Good news for online store operators - those who believe that the digital progress growing potential has already peaked, couldn't be more wrong. Even in 2016, the number of internet users in Germany alone increased by four percentage points in comparison to the year before. Despite 84 percent of the German-speaking population over the age of 14 already using the internet, experts envisage an average growth rate of 13 percent per year in the digital economy by 2020. Becoming particularly clear is the potential online revenue, with regard to developments in mobile commerce, which between 2015 and 2016 alone increased by some 45 percent in Germany and the USA, while increasing by more than 80 percent in other countries.
To be able to make the most of the opportunities on offer, vendors need to confront diverse challenges - notably by comprehensively translating online stores into other languages to gain a foothold in foreign target markets, as well optimizing e-commerce offers when it comes to SEO, keywords and mobile usability. Linguistic adaptation is the first significant step; around 75 percent of internet users worldwide only consider buying products online when the information is available in their own language. In this context, translations must be considered as part of sophisticated localization plans, since online stores not only need to adapt to their target markets linguistically; several other aspects like cultural conditions, symbolism, images, typical colors and culture-normative emotional connections should also be taken into account. This is so that a holistic, multilingual solution for the perfect international online aesthetic is created and the end-user no longer notices a difference between home-grown and international e-commerce.
In terms of effective localization, the translations of online stores should also be optimized for search engines, which is significantly more complex than it is for other types of websites. With hundreds of individual products, both keyword and content management are prone to duplicate content, which results in a detrimentally lower search engine ranking. The product metadata behind the displayed, front-end content, as well as the SEO keywords, quickly increase the complexity making an experienced service provider necessary for having good online searchability. A complete relaunch of the online store should also aim to achieve maximum compatibility with mobile devices. From page navigation to payment processing, all while taking conventional practices for the target market into account - mobile website use should feel just as intuitive as using a computer originally was.
Outsourcing all sub-processes through several service providers increases the susceptibility to errors. This is why choosing a professional full service provider like KERN AG Language Services is recommended. This also reduces the workload on the customer's side, as only one contact person is required instead of several. And that's how tasking KERN AG with your entire project can guarantee that internationalizing your online store is executed in the best possible way, with transparency across all sub-processes, bringing diverse growth potential and perfectly tailoring your business to e-commerce in the 21st Century.
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