Use this tech combo to create local product experiences on online shops

Brands can create emotion in local markets to boost global product sales, using a Multilingual CMS like Wezen combined with their Product Information Managers (PIM).

The ruthless rivalry among e-commerce brands is about their ability to provide an experience around products. This is why online and physical stores are constantly finding new ways to promote content to generate traffic, brand awareness and sales. From popup stores to video channels and targeted landing pages, a great deal of media is used to showcase a story around products to customers, ultimately creating this special emotion they are looking for.

In order to succeed, Product Experience necessarily requires to generate a variety of media to consolidate a whole experience. To centralize products with categories, videos, images, and product descriptions, brands may benefit from Product Experience Management technology (PXM) such as Akeneo. This creates order in the management of their multi-channel data and allow them to start monitoring the performance of branded content.

However, as an online shop, you also need your actual content to match the quality level of communication your visitors expect. If you are selling overseas, a first step towards great communication is usually to speak to each market in the right language. Suddenly, product information has to manage multiple languages, and you are facing the challenges of content production as many times as you have markets:

How can I generate multilingual content experiences?

In addition to your PIM or PXM, dedicated tools for global content creation can help. Here is a list of tricky situations where you could rely on a Multilingual Content Management solution like Wezen that extends your PIM capabilities to power multilingual descriptions.

Multilingual descriptions prove to be a pain 😓

Why can’t your PIM address localization alone? The process of translating seems rather straightforward: get content to localize, translate it, make translations available, done.

When you ask someone about their experience in localizing websites, they are likely to say that even if the concept of translating something seems simple, getting your website live in another language was actually more painful than they expected. There is a good chance that:

• you realize that the map of your content is far more complex, and you have not anticipated how many types of texts you should translate,
• you face the fact that you have little control over translation pace, and can hardly estimate a deadline for your process to be complete,
• once content are supposed to be ready you discover some pages are broken, your purchase funnel does not work, and your search engine rankings are terrible.

The same goes for technology. At first glance, PIM or PXM platforms are easy to use and can solve a lot of problems related to global content; they provide a solid structure for multilingual catalogs and pages. However, because there are more challenges around this type of projects, you could feel like you are still limited in that environment. You will soon be looking for additional technology to overcome a semantic barrier that leads to multilingual experiences.

Huge volume of content needs strong processes ➡️

If you are using a PIM, there is a good chance you have a fairly large product catalog. This means that to translate loads of content, so you may ask:

• “There are many variations for a master product. Can I propagate the translations of master fields and only isolate content variations to localize, or will people re-translate every field every time?”
• “Some people updated content descriptions. How do I identify content and languages for which translation updates are required?”
• “Also, when I send updates for localization, it seems I will pay for the entire product sheet again. How can I focus on the translation of edits only?”
• “I am opening a new market and I already had translations done for that language on another market. So I would like use those translations and make local adaptations. How can I avoid re-translating everything while also keeping track of what content still needs some rework?”

Any of those 4 common challenges, if unanswered, can result in catastrophic performance both operationally and financially. Not only could your teams be overwhelmed with massive content to track and perform useless work, you may also miss opportunities to save loads of budget. On the other hand, using technology designed to address those situations ensures that your content stays consistent, your teams focus on what is important, and you control both budget and execution.

Industrial content production does require a focus on local details 🔍

Once you figure out how to manage global content and implement a powerful framework, you will realize that you also need to fix other people’s problems. Localizing your PIM content also means to take a closer look at your actual content, and at the people processing it. This is when you start to hear:

• “Should people translate alt and title attributes in HTML content, and how?”
• “For Japanese there are specific linguistic rules, know as Kinsoku-shori. If we don’t pay attention, translations may mean something completely different once posted online.”
• “In China, new regulations require for us to add another step in the translation process: we have to check terminology for regulatory compliance. How can we enforce a specific workflow?”
• “It seems like we don’t know exactly when we should be translating something, as the notification system is limited.”

This kind of operational questions will rise and multiply along with markets, and fatally bring a complex multi-local dimension to your projects. Your PIM still may seem like a decent solution but you will soon be tempted to bring customization to the tool. This is what you absolutely want to avoid, as it changes your operational project into a development project. In this situation you would start to consider using specific technology in addition to your PIM.

How can you get linguists onboard? 🗣️

There is a good chance you convince everyone to make the move with a dedicated platform thanks to a final argument. This has to do with the very people who work on your texts: linguists require a set of tools to deliver quality content fast. If you wish content to convey the product experience you aim at, it is important to grasp the context in which your translations are created.

• Linguists use Computer Assisted Translation tools like Translation Memories, adaptive Machine Translation or QA checkers. Those help speed up the process of localization and make sure your content is consistent. Using Wezen for example, an SEO term base is available to promote SEO-friendly translation. And the platform detects correlated pieces of text, so validated translations are automatically applied to identical content.
• Finally, translation managers — either working internally or with an external agency — need to be able to track what is happening with each translator, through what is usually called a Translation Management System.

In a nutshell, you will face the fact that for your content to be valuable:

Translators can’t work in your PIM.

Even though your PIM may offer a rich text editor and workflow notifications — Akeneo is a nice option — it just was not made for content editing. It does provide the structure for content but lacks the suite of tools specific to copywriting and translation workflows. Those tools are about the content itself and how to make it perform. This is why brands usually use a Translation Management System or a more complete solution like Wezen, as they empower everyone involved in their localization projects.

Going back to the goal of providing a product experience to visitors: the success of this experience resides in how much value your content can convey. So it is about the details of how your content is created. Address this challenge thanks to the right solution, so you can go global combining a PIM with a platform that focuses on linguistic content creation.

😀 To see how Wezen can solve each of the examples of challenges that were given across this article, feel free to ask for a quick demo! 👋