Supernova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Problem

Running a business is hard; running a business in a second language is even harder. Of the world's population, less than 5% speak English as their native language. This statistic has significant implications for Shopify – a commerce platform provider for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems – whose mission is to make commerce better for everyone, everywhere.

Reinforcing its commitment to continually evolve its offering to drive customer success, the company sought to localize its primary dashboard which provides core functionality such as inventory management, website management, and check out and transaction processing.

Shopify put in place an ambitious plan: to translate and localize its administrator portal in 6 languages: French, German, Japanese, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish, but wanted to do so carefully, avoiding a resource drain that could slow down company operations overall.

The Solution

Following a study of global eCommerce spend, economy size, credit card usage, merchant feedback, and other key considerations, Shopify identified 6 languages for localization representing the greatest market opportunity. The company centralized its localization program by integrating with the Smartling Translation Management System via Smartling’s API service and Shopify’s proprietary middleware. This enabled Shopify to scale language translation for its entire development system -comprising hundreds of content repositories - into a single platform. The solution needed to support speed-to-market imperatives by reducing time and effort for evaluation, and improving translation efficacy and velocity, so as not to drain resources and overburden staff.The flexibility to leverage an outside translation and localization outfit, as well as Shopify’s in-house freelance translators was key and the solution offered a seamless interface to leverage this mixed talent pool.

The results

While Shopify has customers in 175 countries worldwide, English-as-a-second-language users now have the newfound convenience of leveraging the Shopify platform in their own native language.

Previously Shopify lacked a centralized team structure for internationalization, with internal resources in each country working on separate, siloed projects, supported by disparate translation software packages. Today, Shopify has in place a centralized internalization team, and nearly 100% of the team use the Shopify Translation Management Platform. All project automation and translation memory assets are contained in the system, and analytics are available in real time. Developers and translators connect to the system with tools and assets at the ready to support any project.

Visual context gives translators access to true and accurate visuals of the content being translated, so translators can see what they are translating and can make fast (and correct) linguistic decisions, reducing translation errors and unnecessary review time, for more cost-effective and timely translations.

The new native language portal functionality reinforces the Shopify brand in international markets and enables the company further lower the barrier to entrepreneurship. New languages also bring new opportunities for Shopify’s developer partners to experiment with localizing their applications – providing a new and compelling growth lever for the Shopify partner ecosystem.

Metrics

A strategic phased approach to translation and localization, supported by the most sophisticated translation management technology available on the market today, has enabled Shopify to launch its Minimal Viable Product in 6 languages in only 5 months with its small by mighty development team. Shopify has placed a significant focus on translation quality, making the key distinction between language and meaning, ensuring content speaks well to the intended audience. Initial beta rollout metrics show an extremely high retention rate, indicating a high user satisfaction rate with the new native-language offerings. Internal staff have described the speed of iteration – 90 changes every hour – as mind blowing. This development pace is putting the company on course to complete all 6 portal translation and localization projects – comprising some 1.3 million words – by the end of 2018. Some of the most important measures of success have come via anecdotal customer testimonials: Feels more like home; More comfortable; I really like Shopify and I don't miss the opportunity to recommend it to ALL!!! Now that the beta is available in Italian… I will do so with even more conviction; Shopify in Portuguese is great! It helps 95% understanding and knowledge. I hope you get even better to get 100% ease of work and understand what we really do for 100% success in eCommerce entrepreneurship! Thank you!; So much better than .

The Technology

Smartling Translation Management Platform

Shopify proprietary internal tooling middleware

Disruptive Factor

The advent of the Internet has brought about a new age of globalization with limitless sales opportunities on a worldwide basis. But our global digital connected-ness does not equate to a homogenous market Pangea.

In an Age of Engage, when organizations work to become more customer-centric and to personalize their offerings, a quick Google search will turn up dozens of articles of company failing in what could be argued is the most important element of personalization – communicating in customers’ preferred/native language.

Using its tech development resources already in place to support its flagship foundational English-language admin dashboard, Shopify went from 1 to 7 native-language versions – without adding headcount – all in the span of 5 months.

Many other organizations would have balked at this idea considering the amount of content that needed to be localized. Shopify has put in place sound project management and technology development best practices to support this initiative. Its Translation Management Platform makes the process of translation and localization seamless – in much the same way its native-language portals are making the business of running a business seamless for non-native English speakers around the globe.

Shining Moment

As it embarked on its internationalization initiative, Shopify tech execs quickly realized it had a huge advantage. As a Canadian company, Shopify had a global ready employee base – many of whom spoke multiple languages and came from different cultural backgrounds, including Shopify’s German-born founder and CEO Tobias “Tobi” Lütke, so the company culture was already primed to deliver a customer experience steeped in respect for cultural diversity and sensitivity.