Is Your Website Ready for International Market?

International expansion is one of the top most priorities for the businesses these days, with over forty five percent of consumers buying goods from stores located overseas. It’s time to hit that segment and gain the market share. Your marketing strategies have to be well planned and must incorporate a number of activities that target international market while not ignoring the locale. Internationalization stands for the process of designing a website which can be easily adapted by different locales. Localization means a process of adapting website for the people of particular region/ regions, culture or language. The very first stage for internationalization involves redesigning of the website with the purpose that it can be localized in order to support potential market, once the website is world ready, it can be localized and it is during this phase that translation occurs. There are some points that companies usually overlook in their rush to go global, but the fact is there implementation can do wonders for the business. Let’s discuss the points necessary for giving a website an international standard:

Design the website while keeping the world in mind: If you want your website to go global, you need a web template that is flexible and while sustaining global consistency it must allow for local content. It is very important for a global web template to be flexible especially in the header and menus, it is imperative because a phrase may double in length if converted into the other language.

Website must be made translation ready: It is a general rule that images must not be embedded with text, for example when we use Google translate on a web page, some text does not change and remains un-translated and the very reason for this is that images have been embedded with the content. By doing it, you make your website tough to translate, this can be undone by translation vendors by opening the images in photoshop or illustrator software but it is a time consuming process and expensive too.

Better to avoid the visual pitfalls: By adding translation option to the website, you have almost gone halfway, but this is not the only thing, each culture has something that it does not accept and can prove to be controversial such as while adding images to a website, one must confirm that it does not inflame the customers. For example, postures, attire and hand gestures do make a big difference and hold dissimilar meaning in different countries. It is possible the things that are accepted at one place might not be accepted at the other, so if you have to add the photos ensure they are acceptable to the local people, it requires you to step out of your own culture and add the content and photographs to the website as per the culture of place where it is being targeted.

Tax payment: Do you have to register for tax to each country you ship the products to? Or you need some information about the VAT? These are the things you must take a note of while considering to expand to the new markets. You will have to pay for the duties at certain conditions, one must establish if they stand eligible for tax free shipping or not.

Payment: Some of the businesses think that accepting the MasterCard, visa or PayPal will cover them everywhere, but this is actually not the case, as in some countries like Japan, people prefer to pay cash on delivery, even in the United States and United Kingdom some customers prefer to pay by cash over other mediums such as bank transfers, credit transfers, eWallets and paper based payments. Making payments easy for the customers in a particular market will directly increase customer reliability and enhance the sales opportunities. The website must be designed in a way that it can technically accept alternative payment types and must also ensure information flow during the checkout.

On time delivery: On time delivery can seem to be an obvious point when you consider international expansion, but delivery has to be competitive and on time. You must make sure that the shipping cost is clear at the very beginning, because a study has revealed that more than fifty percent of the customers will abandon the checkout, if they find unexpected amount at the time of making payment. It is good to install software that calculates cost and estimate delivery time, and will convert currency for the buyer. Even if your cost is on a higher side from competitors the consumer will pay additional cost for something he likes. Same goes for the service industry, website must be clear about the objective and has to be customer oriented, it must contain working customer support numbers and email ids and the revert for any query must be prompt.

As cross border selling grows, there has been a trend of attracting international visitors through different search engines and advertisements. This may involve use of country specific domain names and the use of keywords in different languages. It is important for you to have government approval so as to carry out business across the home country. If there are any restrictions or a license is needed to export the material, please note to mention it on the website. In case, you offer online sales or ecommerce, you have to program the catalogue and shopping cart in a way that it restricts sales of the products that require export license. Even if your website shares information only and does not sell anything online, it is good to post a notice that shows exporting details or geographical requirements on the website. It would be a big tragedy if you invest time and money in localizing a website but no one finds it, this thing takes place when companies do not develop global gateway strategies that are super effective.

The tips mentioned above, will help businesses to develop their websites in the right direction, the more you know about “world ready website” at the earlier stages, the lesser localization mistakes you make at later stages.