localization
Localization is not translation
Translating your site is the cheapest part of localization and the least important. The parts that actually move conversion are pricing, payments, trust signals, and support hours.
A team translates its website into German, ships it, and watches conversion stay flat. The conclusion they draw is that Germany is a hard market. The conclusion they should draw is that they localized the layer that mattered least.
Translation is table stakes. It gets you from unusable to usable. It does not get you to bought. Here is the rest of the stack, roughly in order of how much it will move your numbers.
1. Payments
This is almost always the largest single lever, and it is boring, which is why it gets deferred.
The failure is not that your checkout breaks. It is that the customer reaches the payment step, does not see the method they trust, and leaves. They do not file a bug. You see it as a funnel drop and blame the copy.
Rough map of what people expect:
| Market | Expected methods |
|---|---|
| Germany | Bank transfer, direct debit (SEPA), invoice |
| Netherlands | iDEAL |
| Brazil | Pix, instalments (parcelamento) |
| Indonesia | Bank transfer, e-wallets, over-the-counter |
| Japan | Convenience store payment, carrier billing, domestic cards |
Instalments deserve their own note. In several Latin American markets, the same price split into instalments outperforms a discount. You are not competing on price. You are competing on monthly cash flow.
2. Price, not currency
Showing the local currency is the easy half. The hard half is choosing the number.
A straight FX conversion of your home price produces prices that look strange (US$49 becomes an unlovely local figure) and are anchored to the wrong reference point. Customers do not compare your price to your home price. They compare it to what they pay locally for the closest thing they understand.
Two things to do:
- Round to a local price psychology. Every market has conventional price endings. Match them.
- Re-anchor against a local substitute. If your product replaces a service that costs a certain amount locally, that is your reference price, regardless of what you charge at home.
3. Trust signals
Trust is the most locally variable thing in the entire funnel, and the one most often copy-pasted.
- A local phone number, even one that routes to a shared inbox, materially lifts conversion in markets where consumer protection is weak and buyers expect recourse.
- A local address on the footer. A registered entity, if you have one.
- The right third-party proof. Logos of your existing customers mean nothing if none of them are recognizable in this market. A single local logo beats ten foreign ones.
- Review platforms differ by country. The platform your buyers check is not the one you already have reviews on.
4. Support hours
If your support coverage does not overlap with the buying window, you will pay for traffic and then fail to close it.
Look at where your sessions cluster in local time. If the peak is 8pm and your team logs off at 5pm in a timezone eight hours away, you are handing every hesitant buyer a night to reconsider.
The fix is not always hiring. Sometimes it is:
- Moving one person's shift.
- A genuinely good self-serve answer to the three questions that generate 60% of pre-sale contacts.
- Being honest in the UI about when a human will reply, which converts better than silence.
5. And then, translation
By all means translate. But translate the right things first, and translate them properly:
- Error messages and checkout copy before marketing copy. A customer who hits a half-translated error at the payment step is gone.
- Have a native speaker who understands the product review it. Machine translation is now good enough to be plausible and still wrong in ways that quietly destroy trust — a formality register that is too casual, a term of art rendered literally.
- Never machine-translate your legal pages and leave it at that.
The order matters
Teams do this backwards because translation is the part you can buy, schedule, and mark complete. Payments, pricing, trust, and coverage are all messier and touch other teams.
They are also where the money is.