Last week at the Seamless Ecommerce Conference, I moderated a panel around localisation – it’s not all about language.
Localisation is one of those conference topics that is about 3 years past its sell-by date. Any merchant that has a customercentric strategy should, by default, solve localisation. As soon as you start to segment customers and plan more personalised customer journeys, you automatically come up against localisation issues like language, cultural norms, payment methods and delivery challenges.
In the past, localisation has come to be a proxy for a multi-language, multi-currency online store, but even this is not as simple as it may first appear. In the Middle East, even the dialect of Arabic used in marketing campaigns can have an impact on results.
Localised Calendars
One consideration for localisation that might not be obvious for companies entering markets like the GCC is a different calendar. It’s not just the weekend being Friday and Saturday, but major religious holidays are different, gifting patterns are different and even shopping hours may be affected by local customs.
Localised Range, Products
Localisation should also be considered when creating product catalogs. As retailers move to a world where products may be personalised, the range that each market offers should be changed to take into account the customers in that area. There may also be regulatory restrictions for some products – even within a region, products may not be allowed to be transported cross-border.
Localised Pricing
One theme that keeps coming up at conferences like Seamless is the increasing use of tools and data to automatically deliver a different experience based on what is known about the customer. In the past, localised pricing might have been something that caused headaches for merchants, but new systems can change the price on a web store to match competitors or based on demand. If you have used Uber or Careem, you might have seen the concept of ‘surge’ pricing which increases the price when demand is high. In the travel industry, hotels may change their prices up to 4 times a day.
While algorithms are getting better, it seems that a human and an algorithm working together can come up with a better analysis than an algorithm working on its own.
Hyper-local – the Future?
At the recent Shopify Unite Conference in San Francisco, the Ecommerce platform announced a mobile app called Frenzy which allows merchants to set up geo-fenced flash sales. The solution allows a retailer to set up an area like a park or a sports stadium as the ‘store’ location and the gamification elements of a flash sale create immediacy and exclusivity.
Start with the Customer.
Localisation is dead. Any retailer that starts with the customer will solve localisation. Consider the multicultural city of Dubai, where the demographics are complicated. While many companies localise for Arabic and English, these are not the most spoken languages. If retailers really understood their customers, the experience might be very different.
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