Increasing your international conversions for your e-store February 18, 2009

A Smart Button from UpClick automatically provides the right language and the price in the right currency to any consumer.

Increasing your international conversions for your website can make a huge difference in your bottom line.

Chances are you already have visitors coming from other countries (if you don’t know – I encourage you to setup an analytics program like Google Analytics).  And if you dig the analysis further – you will find that the sales that you are getting from other countries probably underpace your local conversions.

A few items (ranging from easy to harder) can dramatically improve your conversions to those countries, here are a few sure ways of significantly boosting your international sales:

• Simple:  present a price in the local currency of the buyer. Make sure your cart software has the ability to automatically display the price in the purchaser’s currency.  Most modern carts do this now.
• Simple:  present a checkout page in the language of the purchaser.  The checkout process is probably one of the areas where you can have the most impact on your conversions.  Selecting the right one can make a huge difference to your bottom line.  Ensure they support all major international languages.  Customers will feel reassured and more likely to complete their transaction.
• Simple:  Have localized pricing.  Instead of letting your cart software do the translation, provide it yourself!   Don’t let your customers see a translated price of £20.54, but rather a more marketing friendly £19.95.  The few cents you lose on a per transaction basis will be more than made up by much higher conversions.   Again, some cart providers give you this ability (of course, UpClick does too).
• Simple to Moderate (depending on who you use):   Present a price of your product in your catalog in the currency of the customer.  If you have to, build a catalog (read store or product page) for each major region (I would start with US, UK, Europe) with each associated currency.   There are several ways to do this:   a)  some shopping cart softwares can handle this using the current exchange rate.  b) if you have a simple product catalog, then set up an IP detection service and automatically redirect customers to the right page (one in each of the currencies).  c)  if you are selling digital goods, then UpClick has a Smart Button feature that will automatically translate the button and present the price in the customer’s regional setting.
• Easy but time-consuming:  Getting your website translated in each of the major languages will drive up your conversions significantly. 
  Lots of companies offer translation services on the web – just make sure you get a service that is capable of delivering a good marketing pitch (so that it doesn’t feel like a dry translation of your website).   Refrain from using automatic translation services – it just doesn’t work!  (You may as well not translate your pages).
  Furthermore, you may be able to launch country specific marketing campaigns where your cost per conversion will be much lower than in the saturated US/UK regions.   Get a language detection script (recommend a Javascript) on your pages and automatically redirect consumers to the right set of pages (but also give them to ability to override that choice with a drop down menu).

I will write follow-up entry on this piece in a subsqequent submission to show you how to further optimize your conversions.   But the items above are what are going to get you the best bang for the buck!  So go ahead… do them (all if you can) and see your profits soar.