Global eCommerce sales are estimated to exceed $5.7 trillion by 2022. This number is expected to rise to $6.3 trillion by 2023. As online shopping increases worldwide, website localization is a crucial key. Merchants who aim to expand internationally should build a website that supports multiple languages.
Here is a list of the top 5 languages with the highest potential effect.
Top 5 languages in higher demand for eCommerce businesses
1. English
English is spoken by 385 million native speakers in 94 countries and by 20 international organizations. English is used by 25.9% of websites with multilingual content.
2. Chinese
Considering China’s population and size, it’s hardly surprising. The internet has 888,453,068 speakers and a 19.4% participation rate. If Asian markets continue to develop internet use, Chinese might replace English as the most popular online language.
3. Spanish
There are around 405 million native Spanish speakers and 363,684,593 Spanish-speaking internet users worldwide. The British Council says Spanish is “useful” for 34% of businesses in the UK.
If you plan to do business in the United States or elsewhere in the Western hemisphere, Spanish should be one of your localization languages.
4. Arabic
The number of users speaking Arabic online is rising faster than any other language. Since 2000, the number of people using the Internet who speak Arabic has increased by more than 5,2%, making it the fourth most popular language online with over 150 million users. Another great beam for your multilingual marketing campaign.
5. Indonesian/Malaysian
That’s definitely one of the unexpected results from the whole list. They make up 4.3% of the world’s internet population, with almost 64% of their active population online (198,029,815).
How to use Shopify Analytics to find out where your traffic is coming from
Do you want to know where the majority of your visitors are coming from?
Shopify’s Acquisition report will help you understand your customers. Then, you can better tailor your marketing and sales strategies to them.
It’s easy to find the Acquisition report in the Reports tab:
Sessions by location
The Sessions by location will show you which countries visit your website.
Please note that the visit will automatically stop if no action is performed within 30 minutes or at midnight UTC. Data can take a few minutes to refresh. Let’s try refreshing the page if the report isn’t showing the most up-to-date data.
Customers by location of the Customers reports:
In addition to Acquisition reports, Customer reports help you segment your target audience while planning a marketing campaign.
And the Customers by location enables you to view orders and customers’ spending information based on their geographical region.
You have undoubtedly discovered the spoken languages and countries of your store’s most frequent buyers using data from useful Shopify Analytics. Next, start working on translating your store’s content into those languages.
Transcy is the best app on Shopify for translating stores into 110+ languages and converting currencies. It ensures that your international customers get a localized shopping experience in their native language and currency. A few clicks do it all.
How to use Transcy to set up a language
Step 1: To add a target language, go to the Language menu > select Add target language.
Step 2: Choose the Type of target language you wish to include.
*Please note: Target languages that have been added to the Advanced language list cannot be added to the Basic language list, and vice versa.
Check out How can I set up Language Settings in the Transcy app? for instructions on bulk actions to publish/unpublish/remove multiple or all target languages at once.
Before you go…
While these 5 languages will get your worldwide expansion off to a good start, using Shopify’s analytics and reports to define your own market is essential. If you want to stand out and be confident that all translations are great, give Transcy a try. What’s more—Transcy has a free plan.
Have a good time translating! ?