Amazon Global: Selling More in the 2020 Marketplace With Localization

Amazon Global grew more than ever in 2020. But how exactly did some companies manage to come out the better in the Amazon Global marketplace?

In early 2020, Amazon Global became more popular than ever with Covid-19 rearing its head. As a platform that lets users make international purchases on Amazon.com, the Amazon Global marketplace became a battleground of players big and small, old and young, experienced and, surprisingly, new.

In fact, several merchants on Amazon Global selling jaw-droppingly niche products didn’t even exist in 2019.

And some companies, including these ‘baby’ stores, managed to find a way to grow bigger, and they keep growing every day.

Was sheer luck the driving factor behind such success?

Well, when it comes to business, it rarely ever is.

And we will not claim to know ALL the reasons that drove these merchants to success on Amazon.

However, we do see a VERY IMPORTANT constant when we take a look at successful Amazon stores. And that is,

CONTENT LOCALIZATION MATTERS!

 Why Should You Localize Your Content?

So why should you localize your content or your Amazon products listing again? Let us explain in a bit more detail. We wrote extensively about content localization and its impact on the conversion rate here. The general idea remains the same, but on Amazon, things are a bit more tricky as you are directly visible, on the same page, with your direct competition and you are addressing people from the market/country you are targeting.

Content localization is such a mind-bogglingly simple concept it makes you feel disappointed that more sellers are not doing it more on Amazon. Especially when you consider what lengths sellers on Amazon go to (finding manufacturers/suppliers, applying to become merchants on Amazon, working on product listing, etc.).

You want to sell coffee in Italy? Well, first of all good luck with that: you will need to have the best coffee in the World. But you also need to speak Italian and explain everything in Italian to Italian coffee buyers. You should have a message for them specifically, you should go through content localization on your Amazon products list. Did you know that content that is locally targeted has six times more engagement than the ones that were designed for the global market? This alone is a strong reason to localize your Amazon products list.

Another important reason why you should go through an extensive content localization process is that on Amazon, everyone can easily build international listings and make their products available in multiple marketplaces. Amazon makes it easy for you to create these listings but the truth is, your Amazon products list will not perform well if you do not have the right strategy regarding the use of language.

Localization vs. Translation

The main difference between localization and translation is that while translation refers to a specific language, localization refers to a specific geographic location. One way to say it is that localization is going one step further in addressing a specific market or a category of customers. For Amazon product listings, the product descriptions have to hit the target customers better than the fierce competition. To better understand how, here’s how we think is the right way to proceed.

Content localization is a process where many specific things have to be covered by the team that handles it. At MotaWord, to better answer the needs of our clients, we prepare the content localization project with them. You should align everything with your content localization team before starting your project.

The most important tool you will use would be a style guide. A style guide is the set of rules for translators that will determine how your company will look, sound and behave in a new market.

These guidelines will enable the company’s content to conform with and natively reflect this new market.

What are some of the components of a localization style guide:

• A clearly defined writing style
• A defined set of personas being addressed. Besides language spoken, what is the range of education levels, beliefs (religious or other), value systems, cultural habits and traditions of the audience you are speaking to and with?
• You’ll need to determine whether the goal is to faithfully recreate the content or creatively recreate the desired outcome of the source content
• Grammatical forms preferred (passive vs. active voice, imperative or infinitive)
• How to use acronyms and initializations (what’s the difference?)
• A complete translation glossary of products and services from source to the target language
• How will the target language content treat slogans?

Once all of these are covered, your content localization project is set up for success. Unless, of course, you insist on doing the following…

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The single biggest mistake you are probably making is getting your content translated by machines, non-professional, cheap translators or language service providers which eventually use those same translators.

By content, I mean, any content. Amazon product listing is not an exception. Consider your product listing as a marketing material with which you are trying to reach out to a broader audience. It is the only piece of content that could make a difference between you and others on Amazon marketplace right? Now think about scrolling through products and seeing product names that make zero sense. Most of the time, you wouldn’t believe what is inside is useful and wouldn’t click, right? I wouldn’t too.

What you need to do is actually quite simple: Work with professionals that have experience in translating Amazon product listings. Make sure you get your images and infographics localized. Do not get your keywords translated randomly. Do keyword check and provide them to the vendor if they have not asked you to do so. I would suggest you to take a look at this free tool.

Do not ever forget converting measurements that are in your content/product listing. This measurement converter is pretty useful for casual checking: Measurement conversion calculators for metric and imperial units.

The honest, bitter truth about e-commerce is that, when people don’t understand what you are selling, when they can’t make sense of the size, the specifications, the color of it, they DON’T buy your product.

For a short list of examples;

Most people outside the U.S. will not know how long a “7-inch screen” is.

Most people in the U.S. will not know how much a “50 kg dumbbell set” weighs.

Most people in Europe and the Americas have never heard of the “reliable cutting-edge technology” of an Asia-based smartphone company, certainly not enough to “rely” on it.

Do you honestly believe that people who don’t know about Imperial units will go to ALL the trouble of converting these units so that they can understand them? Just to see IF they are interested in your product?

Or will they just search for other options where they can IMMEDIATELY understand the material that’s presented to them? Because that’s what you really do with your product list, you make a presentation. You are not listing those products for the Amazon support team or yourself to see, right? You are doing it to PRESENT your product to potential customers.

And, why would anyone like a presentation that they can’t make sense of?

Of course, these are all assuming that your target demographic speaks English. If they want to, they can find material in their own language, quite easily in fact. And even when the user knows English, if they are from a non-English-speaking country, they will not search in English to shop online.

Make sure above points are taken care of before launching your Amazon product listings.

To sum up, to increase your sales on Amazon and expand internationally, you need to localize your content, and the only reliable way to do it is to use localization specialists.

MotaWord is the World’s Fastest Business Translation Platform with 28,000+ professional translators from over 150 countries working in 92 languages. MotaWord has extensive experience on multilingual content localization and can help you with the localization of your Amazon products list. Every single project on MotaWord is proofread and the translators can only translate into their native language. MotaWord’s award winning technology assists translators in their work to deliver the best quality translation and localization service, in record times. Need more convincing on why you should run your localization project on MotaWord? Here’s a whole article on the subject!

If not, upload your document here to receive your instant quote and start your content localization project now!