The rise of global eCommerce has eliminated geographical boundaries in online retail. While this opens unique opportunities to reach customers worldwide, true international success requires more than global availability. It demands carefully tailored shopping experiences that align with local languages, preferences, and cultural expectations.

According to CSA research, 76% of customers prefer products with information in their own language, while many other studies claim that around 90% prefer paying in their local currency. Considering this, sticking to just one language and currency means missing out on potential customers and creating unnecessary barriers between your products and international buyers.

Today’s guide outlines key elements of establishing an effective international eCommerce presence in multiple languages and currencies, including describing the Sylius approach to multiple languages and currencies. Let’s begin with the importance of content localization to have a starting point.

Quick jump

The importance of content localization for target markets

Content localization is more than just translating content. It’s adapting all marketing efforts, visual elements and messaging to local cultural preferences and market expectations.

The foundation of successful localization is adapting marketing messages to local cultural values, adjusting visual content to regional preferences, and developing market-specific SEO strategies. For example, localization considers regional search patterns, local keywords, and specific user intent to be visible in each market. It also includes social proof, where featuring testimonials from the region and case studies can increase trust and credibility. 

Moreover, localization efforts must account for technical aspects such as date formats, measurement units, and payment preferences to create an optimized user experience that feels native to each market.

Now that we have explained what content localization consists of let’s take a closer look at website translations. 

How to ensure high-quality, consistent translation in an eCommerce store?

Choosing the translation methods for a website’s content usually includes two options: automated translation and professional translators. For eCommerce businesses, automated translation tools like Google Translate, DeepL, or ChatGPT can offer a quick and cost-effective solution. They enable instant translation of large volumes of products, descriptions, and blog content. Automated translations are particularly useful for websites with frequently updated content. However, such translations may lack cultural adaptation and sometimes lack precision, which can impact brand perception and SEO. 

Leveraging professional translation services, in turn, ensures accurate translation and culturally appropriate content. This option is particularly recommended for crucial elements such as product descriptions, homepage content, and key marketing materials. Professional translations typically offer better brand consistency, help build trust among target audiences, and lead to better search engine rankings.

Tools supporting content translation and managing a multilingual website

Moving on, multilingual content management starts with a solid Content Management System (CMS). Industry-standard solutions like WordPress and dedicated eCommerce platforms like Magento, Shopware, or Sylius provide the functionality to create and manage multilingual websites. On top of these platforms, successful multilingual content management relies on specialized tools and implementations. 

At the base is keyword research for the target audience, where tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush, or SurferSEO became invaluable in understanding regional search patterns and user behavior across different markets. As mentioned earlier, this research isn’t just about direct translation but about how users in different regions search for similar products or services. What’s more, business owners should not forget about technical SEO, especially when optimizing the website structure. These technical elements create a framework that tells search engines how to interpret language targeting and prevent duplicate content issues across different website language versions.

Lastly, the website should be supported by efficient cross-language navigation tools such as Language Switcher (for WordPress), which implements a robust internal linking strategy across all language versions. This simplifies the user experience with language switchers and keeps the URL structure the same across all languages so search engines can crawl and index efficiently.

Together, all these tools and implementations can form an ecosystem that supports multilingual content management and visibility across different markets.

Automatic currency conversion in eCommerce

Let’s now focus on managing multiple currencies within the online store. Automatic currency conversion in eCommerce is a significant convenience for customers as they can see and pay in their own currency, making transactions more transparent and trustworthy. Online businesses aiming to showcase their products to a global audience need payment solutions supporting multiple currencies. Otherwise, a vast amount of customers can abandon the store due to the lack of their local currency.

Automatic currency conversion is not a feature that merchants can implement and forget about. eCommerce businesses must pay attention to fluctuating exchange rates and transaction fees to correct the numbers manually or utilize a trusted solution, like the European Central Bank Services.

Operating a multilanguage and multicurrency eCommerce store comes with several challenges, from ensuring seamless technical performance to managing complex currency and payment processing systems. Providing a consistent user experience across different languages and regions requires meticulous system integration and optimization. Balancing these elements is essential to meet the expectations of a global audience while maintaining efficiency and scalability.

Technical performance

One of the fundamental challenges lies in maintaining optimal website performance while handling multilingual content. This involves ensuring fast loading speeds despite managing increased content volume across different languages. The complexity extends to implementing efficient content delivery networks (CDN) that must serve different regions effectively while also maintaining proper cache management for multiple language versions. The additional technical strain comes from the need to ensure smooth API integrations between various systems and services while keeping data synchronized across different regional versions of the store.

Currency and payment processing 

Secondly, businesses have to navigate fluctuating exchange rates that affect pricing and profit margins. It gets even more complicated when you have to deal with different transaction fees from various payment providers and real-time currency conversion. Payment gateways become even more tricky as each one has different processing requirements and fee structures. A key step in multi-currency implementation is to choose payment gateways that support all your required currencies – not all providers support multi-currency transactions. You need to think of dynamic pricing strategies to account for rate volatility and profit across all markets and verify payment gateway currency support before implementation.

User experience 

Creating a seamless user experience across multiple languages and currencies requires careful attention to detail. The challenge lies in maintaining consistency in the shopping experience regardless of the user’s language preference or location. This includes ensuring accurate currency display and conversion, managing smooth payment processes across regions, and providing transparent communication about fees and exchange rates. The system must also adapt to display appropriate regional pricing and payment options while maintaining a user-friendly interface.

System integration 

Integrating systems in a multilingual and multi-currency store requires careful technical planning. Each component – from payment gateways to inventory systems – must work together seamlessly while handling multiple currencies and languages correctly, particularly when processing orders and managing customer data across different regions. The challenge extends to ensuring proper synchronization of inventory across different currency zones and managing multiple banking relationships for different currencies. Additionally, businesses must successfully integrate local payment methods preferred in various markets, all while maintaining system stability and reliability. 

Sylius – comprehensive solution for international eCommerce

Sylius is a flexible, open-source eCommerce solution that supports internationalization on many levels. Built on the robust Symfony framework, it combines enterprise-grade capabilities with developer-friendly architecture. Its modular architecture allows for easy customization and extension of core features, making it possible to adapt the platform to specific business requirements and scale as your business grows. 

Multi-language in Sylius  

Sylius offers comprehensive language capabilities through an efficiently designed database structure. Instead of expanding the main product table indefinitely, Sylius implements separate translation tables for each dynamic entity (such as products, variants, and attributes), where each language version is stored as a separate row. This architecture allows businesses to cater to a diverse global customer base without compromising performance – even stores with 50 different languages can operate efficiently by loading only the required locale data per request.

Store managers can handle all translations through a single, intuitive admin interface without needing technical knowledge. Each element, whether it’s product information, marketing materials, or navigation menus, can be easily translated. The system automatically generates SEO-friendly URLs and meta tags for each language while ensuring optimal performance. However, developers need to pay special attention to database queries when handling products with multiple related entities (like variants and attributes) to avoid the n+1 query issue. When properly implemented, Sylius’s translation system ensures optimal performance while maintaining full multilingual capabilities.

Multi-currency in Sylius

Sylius implements a robust multi-currency system where each sales channel operates with one assigned base currency. For instance, in a multi-channel setup like B2C (EUR) and B2B (USD), merchants need to set product prices separately for each channel in its respective base currency. While each channel has one primary currency, it can support an unlimited number of additional display currencies.

The platform manages currency conversions through configurable exchange rates that reflect current market conditions. Through integration with external services like the European Central Bank, Sylius can automatically synchronize exchange rates in real-time. This system supports virtually all world currencies without performance impact due to its streamlined conversion process.

However, merchants should be mindful of three key aspects: rounding differences during currency conversion, payment gateway currency limitations (as not all payment providers support every currency), and the need for regular exchange rate monitoring and updates. Store owners can either set specific prices for different channels manually or rely on automated calculations based on current exchange rates.

Lastly, Sylius offers integrations with the most prominent payment solutions, including Adyen, Mollie, Paypal, and more. This way, it covers 99% of available payment methods. 

Adyen
Mollie

Examples of Sylius-based stores that leverage multilanguage and multicurrency support 

Before we move on to the conclusion, check out the stores that successfully use multiple languages and currencies in their Sylius-based eCommerce website.

Mytheresa
Albeco

Wrapping up

Running a multilingual and multi-currency online store has become essential for success in today’s global eCommerce world. As we’ve explored, true internationalization extends far beyond basic translation and currency conversion – it demands comprehensive content localization, robust technical implementation, and thoughtful user experience optimization.

Leading brands like Mytheresa have demonstrated how powerful a well-executed international eCommerce strategy can be. With Sylius as your foundation, you have all the tools needed to build truly borderless eCommerce experiences. By understanding and addressing the key challenges we’ve discussed, businesses can effectively reach and serve customers across different languages and currencies, driving growth in the global marketplace.

Remember that international eCommerce success is a journey. Through continuous monitoring, optimization, and adaptation to changing market conditions, the multilingual and multi-currency store will maintain its competitive edge and continue serving your global customer base effectively.

Ready to take your eCommerce business global? Check our blog “Expansion of eCommerce to foreign markets – essential factors for market entry” or contact us.