Mind your language: Is English holding back ecommerce?

It isn't hard to get the impression companies from the US and UK conduct the lion's share of business on the web, but how well are they planning their foreign operations? Is multilingual localisation part of companies' ecommerce strategies or are most firms still relying on English language content?

According to a recent report by Forrester, multilingual sites will be the driving force behind successful ecommerce companies. The research outfit predicts 50 per cent of all online sales will be made outside the US by 2004. But according to Eric Schmitt, research analyst and one of the authors of the study, many multinational companies are arrogant when it comes to localised content.

"It is a question of customer loyalty, not just building a global brand," he said. "A traditional company's brand name is no longer a guarantee it will succeed online outside its home market. Successful ecommerce marketing relies on the knowledge of local markets both culturally and linguistically and too many UK-based companies are counting on other European countries' ability and willingness to speak English. "

Most continental Europeans speak at least basic English, but when it comes to the information customers need to understand a product, local language is seen as an advantage, the report concludes.

A successful online sales operation is a personalised experience, according to Timo Saarinen, professor of ecommerce at Helsinki Business School.

"If online customers have to translate product information first, the shopping experience is far from individualised. Customers are more likely to shop online if they understand product descriptions effortlessly," he said.

Language is not the only regional barrier when it comes to launching a globalised ecommerce initiative. Europe is a large, heterogeneous marketplace and a northern European customer sees online marketing differently compared to her southern counterparts.

Forrester's Schmitt added: "It comes down to more than putting a catalogue online in English or French."

International expansion has conventionally started at the local level with a business's physical presence. The travel industry has a long tradition of multilingual practices. For example, British Airways website boasts different languages and country-specific navigation facilities but when a customer wants to make a booking online, the site reverts automatically to English.

Schmitt explains: "It is called bait and switch marketing. The site lures customers into thinking they can order a ticket in a local language but because the site is linked to an old mainframe booking system, it comes up in English."

Dale Vile, analyst at Bloor Research added: "The backbone of many ecommerce operations is based on mature legacy systems. The sales and order processing systems are often old software integrated with front end operations and they subsequently make the site look like a hastily compiled patchwork."

He said redesigning a database - originally written for just English but which later needs to accommodate foreign language characters or even different alphabets - is a costly operation. Just to add an extra description feature may be difficult and some applications may run into convergence difficulties.

Vile added: "Companies often begin to plan their internationalisation too late by adding local language websites with no back end support. Internationalising a company's architecture is a bit like building a house. You cannot keep on adding to the foundation once it's in place or you will have to restructure the whole building."

BA seems confident its copy and paste-style website will be a success.

"Last year we had £60m in online ticket sales revenue and we are expecting the figure to grow to £250m by the end of this year," a BA spokeswoman told silicon.com. The company said it is in the process of making its web content fully localised.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hedley Rees-Evans, director of Web Solutions at SDL, a multilingual content management firm, agreed with the analysts.

He said: "Many UK companies are ignoring the importance of multilingual sites as a sales channel. English speaking companies are often shortsighted and may think of their domestic market first. Many US businesses too are failing to launch their products in the diverse European marketplace because of a lack of understanding of local cultures."

He continued: "Start-up companies have an advantage to a degree as they are more likely to be investing in regionalised web content from the outset."

Some parts of Europe are forced to think internationally because of the size of their domestic market according to Jonathan Steel, chairman of consultancy the Bathwick Group.

"One of the reasons Nordic countries have been successful in the high-tech arena is their tendency to think internationally because of the small size of their populations," he said.

"These countries also nurture a cultural climate which sees foreign languages as a natural part of everyday communication."

The adoption of the English language in the early days of computing is now coming back to haunt some companies looking to the web and ecommerce.

Localisation can mean costly projects because many back office systems are out of date and cannot cope with foreign language characters.

However, just flirting with a global marketing strategy isn't enough to acquire customers across borders. To get it right, as with most IT projects, it pays to plan ahead.