Best practice for selling in multiple markets and languages

[Ingrid1234]

Hi, 

We are building an online store, selling digital downloads worldwide.

Our business is located in Norway (hence our primary market will automatically be set to Norway), but we are facing some challenges when trying to implement several languages. Using Translate & Adapt is working well for translating product descriptions etc., but I struggle with having to select the same default language for the different markets. Ideally, the default language in Norway would be Norwegian, but for the International market, it would be English. But this is not possible, so we have English as the default language in Norway as well.

It works well if you select a different market (e.g. the US) and English, but if you select English while your are in Norway, the text on the page will be in Norwegian (because this is translated in the editing tool to fit this market), but the product descriptions will be in English, as this is fetched from the Translate app. I therefore struggle with translating the content on our website, as this has to be done in the editing tool, and not in the Translate app, right?

Have anyone set up a store with mulitple languages and multiple markets, and can help us finding best practice here? Do we have to consider having different domains, or are there any way to have different default languages for the different markets?

[richbrown_staff]

Hey @Ingrid1234 , could you get in touch via DM? I'm on the design team for Translate & Adapt and I'd like to understand the setup you have better. 

[richbrown_staff]

Hi @Ingrid1234 , following up here. Happy to help 

[Ingrid1234]

Hi! 

I think I managed to find a different setup that worked, but for future customers, a good guide on what to use markets and what to use Localize/translations could be helpful. Coming from Wix, the setup in Shopify was a bit confusing at first to be honest, even for me with a technical background. Will ask if we run into any difficulties with the current setup.

[richbrown_staff]

That's encouraging you've got things to a better place. Could we still connect on a call so I can understand your experiences - particularly given you're migrating to Shopify? From your initial post I'd be concerned things aren't setup as they ought to be. E.g. this sentence: "It works well if you select a different market (e.g. the US) and English, but if you select English while your are in Norway, the text on the page will be in Norwegian (because this is translated in the editing tool to fit this market), but the product descriptions will be in English, as this is fetched from the Translate app. "

Translate & Adapt is setup to translate from your default language into other languages. Then of you want to override a language by market, i.e. adapting, then you can - e.g. in the US you would write color but in the UK it would be colour. However it's unlikely you'd ever use this capability for Norwegian, which is where I was wondering if things might not be totally clear. I'd like to help you get setup optimally and understand any confusion you came across. Rich

[Palianytsia]

Hey @richbrown_staff 

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@richbrown_staff wrote:

Hey @Ingrid1234 , could you get in touch via DM? 

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It seems this website doesn't support DM, at least for me as a novice, does it?

And I have an additional question:
Is this setup good and there are no better ones, perhaps some nuances?

Our main language is Ukrainian, which doesn't have ready translations for the Theme resourses. So I get translations from English but I don't need English for our store to show at the moment. That's why I set English as a default language in Settings-Languages and leave only Ukrainian and russian in Settings-Markets. May I have some drawbacks in this case?