4 tips for internationalizing your online store

One of the greatest advantages of the digital marketplace is the opportunity to overcome geographical barriers. Selling internationally makes it possible to diversify revenue streams, reduce risks, and increase competitiveness with other shops, thereby increasing turnover.

Selling online in other countries can be a great business opportunity, provided you take the right measures to internationalize your ecommerce business.

What to do before getting to the strategy

Internationalizing a company is not an easy thing to do; it requires effort and resources to define and carry out a strategy. Before deciding to start selling abroad, several actions need to be taken to prepare the ground and ensure that your strategies work as planned.

Work on your website

• When preparing to internationalize your ecommerce business, working on your website is one of the most important steps. This includes carrying out a website traffic analysis and selecting the most suitable products for the country you want to start selling in.
• Secondly, organise your online shop in a clear and orderly manner.

1. Each product card must be clear and complete with all information. The user compares different shops, so the better the product is displayed, the greater the differentiation from others.
2. Optimizing the text on your website frequently is crucial to ensure that your website is properly positioned in search engines. By analyzing the words on the internet, search engines determine the relevance of a website to a user's search query. Therefore, it's important to use relevant keywords and phrases in your website content. This helps to improve your website's search engine ranking, making it more visible to potential customers.
3. Simplify the purchase path by reducing the number of clicks. The fewer steps the customer has to take, the more likely they are to buy.
4. Create a menu by categories and add a search engine within the site to make it easier for users to find what they want.

Create a multilingual shop

Creating a multilingual shop is essential when it comes to selling online in other countries. It makes it easier for customers to navigate your website and find what they are looking for in their own language. To achieve this, you need to translate all content into the language of the chosen country or countries, including your product content, landing page, ads, blog, and everything related to the sales process. Use a plugin that allows you to translate not only the products and the catalogue part but also the CMS part, the modules and the theme of your shop. One of the best tools specialised in PrestaShop is Glotio, an advanced translator that automatically detects new content added in the default language and translates it, inserting it directly into the corresponding part. Since the translations are saved on your server, you are not dependent on the availability and operation of the automatic translator service, so these translations are always visible in your online shop.

Invest in an SEO strategy

Investing in an SEO strategy is crucial when it comes to internationalizing your ecommerce business. You can increase your website's search engine ranking and drive more traffic to your website. This is particularly important when selling online in other countries, as it helps to make your online shop more visible to potential customers in your target market. Translating content and optimising it in the customer's language is a key factor in improving your brand's search ranking in each target market, as Google and other search engines will index all the pages of your online shop in as many languages as you have translated them. This will increase your sales conversion rate, thanks to the organic positioning that associates your e-commerce with the target search results, and the increased authority of the different pages.

Glotio's technology enables technical and off-page SEO in all languages, including architecture, meta info, meta-tagging, internal and external links (link building), etc.

Customise your shop for each country

When expanding sales to other countries, it is important to adapt to the markets. It's important to adapt to the local market by studying the legislation, taxation, and cultural differences of each country. This includes complying with legal requirements and bureaucracy for export, payment of taxes and fees, currency volatility, as well as administrative procedures, health, and export standards.

Rely on local distributors. Logistics can be complicated for most small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that have less economic strength, but they can make the leap abroad by working with local distributors or establishing themselves directly in other markets. By customizing your online shop for each country, you can provide a tailored shopping experience for your customers, which can help to increase customer loyalty and sales.