Introduction
Internationalization -- the process of updating an online store so it can sell to customers in other countries -- is usually a complex and costly undertaking. It requires expertise in a number of fields to properly plan, execute and maintain sites targeted for different countries and different languages. Eager to increase international sales, many companies dive into internationalization without making clear business cases and without fully appreciating the effort required to transform and maintain their new online stores.
This paper presents several best practices when internationalizing an e-commerce site.

A Growing Market
Callout: “Any great company is going to do over half their sales outside North America.” - Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

By all measurements, the Internet continues to grow, as does the comfort people have with buying goods online. According to AT Kearney, global e-commerce has grown 13 percent annually over the past five years, and no one is expecting that to decrease.
A common objection to selling online (both domestic and international) is that e-commerce will cannibalize brick-and-mortar sales. However, research from PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that when consumers use multiple channels, such as visiting both online and offline shops, the majority spend more at their favorite retailers. Nearly one in five says they’re spending at least 25 percent more.
Clearly, large potential customer bases can be tapped when online stores target international users.

Issues
Selling internationally can bring your products to thousands of new customers if done properly. There must be a solid business case for each country you intend to reach, beyond an executive getting excited by an article they read extolling the limitless potential of China and Brazil. Both of those countries have, in addition to many people purchasing online, a number of large, well-entrenched domestic online stores. Companies must have plans to compete successfully with these businesses.
There are, of course, massive technical hurdles to overcome, including removing all text to resource files, establishing a CMS and using an internationalization-friendly framework. And internationalization work must be done in parallel with development on the current Web site, since few marketing departments will be happy not updating a site for the months it will take to build the international version.
Designs must take into account cultural sensitivities as well. For example, in the West, green is associated with nature and environmental awareness, but it’s known as the “forbidden color” in Indonesia , and should be avoided for that audience.
There are many other issues to contend with when internationalizing your e-commerce site. Below are best practices learned through years of experience. Both strategic approaches and more technical practices are covered.  Play up our experience more!

Best Practices

1. Have a clear business case for each country you want to reach
   • While China and Brazil are the current leaders in the press for non-U.S. populations that are shopping online, are they right for your store? Or are you getting a significant number of visits from France or Argentina? Once you use analytics to see where customers are already coming from, start learning about the online shopping behavior of that demographic. Do people there shop online often? What do they shop for? Are they comfortable using credit cards or do they prefer COD? Is there even sufficient broadband penetration in that country to display your Web site properly?
   • Will you be able to compete with existing domestic players? If so, how? According to AT Kearny, in Chile, retailers Falabella and Cencosud combined to own nearly 40 percent of their home country's online retail market. In Brazil, retailers B2W and Magazine Luiza own 30 percent of the Brazil market. Similar trends are occurring across Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
   • It’s vital to understand the behavior of your new target market, how it’s different from what you’re used to and how you can tailor your online experience to take advantage.
2. Be prepared to take different forms of payment besides credit cards
   • For example, Scandinavian countries prefer to pay COD, while Germans are often more comfortable with bank-direct payments. Expand upon this section, critical
3. Don’t treat internationalization as just a feature on your web site
   • Internationalization is more of a transformation of a site than an enhancement, and may require a ground-up rewrite of your site in order to implement it correctly. Treating it as just another feature to be tacked on during a sprint will not give your developers enough time to plan and execute properly.
4. Don’t worry about mobile
   • At least, don’t worry about mobile initially. Not as many people purchase on mobile devices as you may think: According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, only 9 percent of shoppers say they they’ve changed their habits to shop with a tablet more often — and around three out of five don’t use this type of device to shop at all.
   • Once you’ve internationalized your site, look at the analytics and see how often people are researching and buying on mobile devices.
5. Prepare your infrastructure for potential legal hurdles
   • Every country has its own laws concerning international trade, consumer protection and commerce in general. Shipping especially can get complicated, so be sure to do your homework.
   • In general, Internet law is still in its infancy.
   • "As of now, there is no comprehensive set of laws or regulations that exist for international electronic commerce," says David D. Barr .  In order to protect yourself as much as possible and limit liability, be sure you have a properly translated terms and conditions and privacy policy, just in case you end up in a legal quagmire. Hopefully, it will never be a problem, but if it is, you’ll be glad for every little bit of protection you had in place.
   • This may seem obvious and common sense, but once you have a privacy policy, follow it. Don’t say one thing, then implement another. It’s a too-common occurrence for lawyers to draw up a privacy policy, and then for a marketer or engineer to implement something entirely different, simply because they were unaware of all the restrictions in the policy.
6. Keep your first steps in internationalization as simple as possible
   • Stakeholders in various departments will immediately try to implement their own desired features into the internationalization effort.  If these requests are granted, a complex undertaking becomes even more complicated. Hold them off. Tell the designers and engineers to hold them off (for when they go around you and talk to the workers directly). When introduced too early, variance and special cases can ruin an otherwise workable system. Internationalization is a complex enough effort without adding extra variables. Be aware of this and be ready to protect your team.
7. Make sure your marketing team is able to market in the countries you’re expanding into.
   • They might have to be local in order to really understand cultural sensitivities, behavior and competition. EXPAND UPON
8. Get explicit write-off on the internationalization plan from any Powers That Be.
   • This is necessary to keep the project moving forward and as clear-edged as possible. People will get almost certainly upset that their desired features won’t be implemented immediately, and it’s likely everyone involved in the project, from the lead through the project managers, the designers, and programmers, will be pressured from individuals who want their own features implemented. Having explicit permission to run the project without interference will (hopefully) stifle any debate before it becomes a problem.
9. Have multilingual support ready and available on launch day
   • For example, don’t launch your site in China without having support people who can speak at least one dialect. Allow enough time for the support team to become familiar with your site and products so that they’re up and ready on the day of launch.
10. Internationalization first, then localization
    • While internationalization means creating a Web site that is available in a number of languages, localization refers to tweaking the site to be more palatable -- in terms of design, text and experience -- to the intended audience.
    • Implementing internationalization before localization is usually more efficient in the long run. It’s a complex process, so doing one step at a time can minimize confusion and bugs.
11. For ideal design, have local (or knowledgeable) people in place.
    • If you’re happy with your current design, it’s tempting to assume that it will work just fine in its new country. That may be so, but that conclusion should come from knowledge, not hope. For example, Chinese, Japanese and Korean users expect to see a greater use of images, videos and sidebars, while Germans and Scandinavians tend to prefer more minimalist and text-heavy designs. In Chinese stock reports red means “up” and green means “down”— the opposite of what Westerners expect. An open palm with extended fingers is an insult in Greece. If you sell clothing for women, your images may work great in North America, but the models will likely have to be more modestly dressed for a site with a Middle Eastern audience.
    • The examples are almost endless. Your design should reflect knowledge of how that design will be received.
12. Avoid Flash when targeting emerging markets
    • Emerging markets often have slower Internet connections, and a memory-hungry Flash could keep them waiting.
13. Be sure design is flexible enough to handle long translations
    • For example, if you’re selling birth control to Germans, leave plenty of room for their translation of "contraceptives": Schwangerschaftverhütungsmittel.
14. Display the local date and time in the correct format
    • For March 12, 2014, know whether you should display 3/12/2014 or 12/3/2014. In China, the time on schedules is often formatted on the 24-hour clock, while a 12-hour clock is used for spoken conversation.
15. Branch the code
    • Internationalization will break major pieces of functionality (before they get fixed again), so branch off the code and roll in new features as it makes sense.
    • If you’re still using Subversion for source control, take a good, long look at git — it’s decentralized, more flexible and merging branches is much easier.
16. Move all text to a resource file
    • Anything that is communicated to the user in English (menus, labels, messages, buttons, tooltips, documentation, etc.) should live in a resource file. This will make swapping out languages much easier.
17. Use a framework
    • Certain frameworks are built with both e-commerce and internationalization in mind, and learning these frameworks is often faster and more efficient than creating your own.
18. Don’t do it yourself
    • Your engineers could probably build their own, perfectly workable system. However, for first-timers, internationalization involves a lot of trial and error, assumptions and experiments: There’s no need for them to re-invent the wheel.
    • It’s more efficient to get the advice of someone (or a company) who’s dealt with the planning, execution and maintenance of an internationalized site a hundred times before, and has a solid understanding of both the work and budget required to make it happen.
    • Don’t get caught in this scenario: You’re halfway through internationalization, and everyone suddenly realizes it’s a much bigger deal than anyone thought. It will cost twice as much, take three times as long and the three key engineers involved just left your company and its lumbering project to join a sexy little startup. A partner experienced in internationalization can make it a much smoother and more predictable road.
19. Separate content from presentation as much as possible
    • In other words, be able to swap out CSS files without blowing up the Web page. When you start to tweak sites based on the target market, you’ll want a flexible framework that allows you to accomplish the necessary visual updates by changing only a few files. For example, you want to be able to update the French version of your site by changing “css/style.css” to “css/style_fr.css” or “fr/css/style.css.”
20. Use CSS Sprites
    • CSS sprites are an excellent tool to improve a site’s responsiveness. And since some locales will have slow internet connections, every little bit helps.
    • Most sites, including Google, use them. Here’s an example:
      • (https://ssl.gstatic.com/gb/images/k1_a31af7ac.png)
        • Note that most projects start out using CSS sprites, but end up drifting away from them. Make sure your technical lead stays on top of this requirement.
21. Avoid text in graphical elements as much as possible
    • It’s easier to change a button’s CSS style in a single file than to go into Photoshop and change it for all languages.
22. Use a CMS
    • You shouldn’t have to rely on engineers in order to update prices, remove products, or update descriptions. CRITICAL – MORE INFO
23. Implement analytics
    • It’s easy for analytics to become an afterthought. Don’t do this! You must also make sure all the analytics report useful information. For example, how will you deal with analytics if product names are in a native language? By making sure reporting is in English (this is why you can’t rely on SEO URLs for this).
24. Make sure international URLs are SEO friendly in the native tongue
    • It’s important that local users can type the product name in their native language in a search engine, and your product will come up. You don’t want them to have to guess the product name in English in order to see a result.
25. Use analysts that are local or understand the culture
    • User behavior can be baffling, but an expert in the local culture is more likely to be able to properly interpret usage patterns and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
26. Don’t use your old testing plan—create a new one
    • You do have a testing plan, don’t you?
27. Test on tablets – MUST BE RESPONSIVE
    • Tablets are becoming more and more popular. In fact, research suggests that "users are turning to their tablet to research products across all advertising categories, from consumer electronics to personal care and beauty to home furnishings.” - Online Publishers Association  
    • While you shouldn't have to do a huge amount of work to accommodate tablets, it's worthwhile to include them in your testing.
28. Test, test, and test some more
    • If you don’t have a dedicated QA team, it’s likely that bugs are slipping through the cracks. Developers are notoriously bad at testing their own sites -- not because of laziness, but rather a mindset of being focused on making something work, instead of searching how to make it not work. Just like writers need editors, developers need QA folk.
29. Test analytics, too.
    • This step is often overlooked but is vital, if the analytics are to measure the right things. Major decisions can be made on analytics, so the analytics better be measuring exactly what everyone thinks they’re measuring.
30. Make sure all engineers know how to implement internationalization in future sprints
    • Internationalization isn’t set-and-forget. It has to be constantly maintained and requires a different mindset. Don’t just send a long email to the development team and hope they’ll remember everything: this step requires both training and constant checking.  
31. Make sure everyone in the company is on-board with internationalization
    • It will likely touch on every part of your business, the more people understand how their jobs have changed (even if it’s just a little), the more smoothly your operation will run.
32. Place small, culturally-aware teams in each locale
    • Ideally, you have a large central team, and a small team located in each country where you’re selling. This small team should consist of a combination of developers, designers, marketers and customer support.
33. Remember what locals want
    • People want to see the local language and pay in local currency for a product that fixes local problems.

* * *

This paper merely touches upon some of the most important best practices of internationalizing an online store. If you’re considering internationalizing your online store, or are at any stage in your internationalization process and could use some help, consider contacting Double Prime.
Extensive experience. Double Prime has spent over a decade building 125 e-commerce sites in more than 30 countries in dozens of languages. We have repeatedly and successfully integrated with the world’s leading payment providers and fulfillment services.
Fast and flexible framework. Double Prime uses the third generation of its PerlGem platform to power more than 100 sites across the globe. Built to be powerful and customizable, it can handle any complex business or technical requirements, and each implementation is heavily customized for each client.
 PerlGem has multi-lingual, multi-country and even multi-brand options so that you can sell items from a shared catalog but under different domain or brand names. It also supports integration to third parties such as CRM/CMS systems, social networking sites, analytics and strategic marketing partners.

Now is a great time to take your online business global
and sell to the entire world.
Double Prime can help with every step.