International conversion rates lagging? It’s usually not one thing – it’s compounding localization gaps in images, pricing, shipping, payments, and support.
TLDR: Ready to start closing your localization gaps? Begin with image localization – install Product Image Translate Easy and eliminate the visual disconnect that undermines your translation investment.
Expanding your Shopify store internationally feels like a growth unlock. New markets, more customers, diversified revenue. The tools exist to make it happen: Shopify Markets for infrastructure, translation apps for content, international shipping solutions for fulfillment.
Yet many merchants launch internationally and find their conversion rates in new markets are a fraction of their home market performance. They’ve done the obvious work – translation, currency, shipping – but something isn’t clicking.
Usually, it’s not one thing. It’s a combination of localization gaps that individually seem minor but collectively create an experience that feels foreign and untrustworthy to international customers.
Here are five common mistakes and how to address them.
This is the most common gap because it’s the least obvious. You’ve translated your product descriptions, collection pages, and checkout flow. Your store reads correctly in German or French or Spanish. Job done, right?
Then a customer switches to German and sees: perfect German product description, German price in euros, and product images with English text splashed across them. Size charts in inches. Infographics explaining benefits in English. Packaging shots showing English labels.
The mismatch is jarring. It signals that localization was incomplete, or worse, that German customers aren’t really the intended audience.
The fix requires recognizing that product images often contain text, and that text needs localization just like your descriptions do. Tools like Product Image Translate Easy let you upload translated image variants and display them based on customer language selection.
Start by auditing your product images for text content. Size charts, infographics, packaging shots, and label images are common culprits. Prioritize your top sellers and highest-traffic international markets first.
Shopify Markets makes it easy to display prices in local currencies. Enable a market, set up currency conversion, and your $50 product automatically shows as €47 or £42 to relevant customers.
But currency conversion isn’t the same as price localization. Converted prices often look strange – €47.23 instead of clean round numbers. They also fluctuate with exchange rates, creating an inconsistent experience and making your profit margins unpredictable.
True price localization means setting deliberate prices for each market. Your product might be $50 in the US and €49 in Germany – a clean, market-appropriate price rather than a mathematical conversion.
Consider local price perception as well. Some markets are more price-sensitive than others. Europeans expect VAT-inclusive pricing by default. Some markets respond better to charm pricing (€49) while others prefer round numbers (€50).
Use Shopify Markets’ price override features to set intentional prices rather than relying on automatic conversion. Test different price points in different markets to find what resonates.
Nothing kills an international sale faster than unexpected shipping costs appearing at checkout. A customer browses your site, adds products to cart, enters their address, and sees a shipping charge that equals or exceeds the product price. Cart abandoned.
This happens when merchants haven’t thought through international shipping economics. Domestic shipping might be subsidized or free over a threshold. International shipping costs significantly more, but revealing those costs only at checkout feels like a bait-and-switch.
Be upfront about international shipping costs. Display shipping information on product pages or create a dedicated shipping page that international visitors can reference before adding to cart. Consider building shipping cost into product prices for international markets rather than showing low product prices and high shipping separately.
Delivery timelines matter equally. If international shipping takes three weeks, say so clearly. Customers accept longer delivery times for international orders when expectations are set properly. They abandon when timelines are unclear or when packages take twice as long as whatever vague estimate they were given.
Credit cards dominate in the US. They’re far less universal internationally. German customers often prefer invoice payment or SOFORT. Dutch customers reach for iDEAL. French customers use Carte Bancaire. Many markets have strong preferences for local payment methods that feel more trustworthy than entering credit card details on a foreign site.
When customers don’t see their preferred payment method, conversion drops. They might not have an alternative readily available. Even if they do, seeing only foreign payment options triggers hesitation – is this site really set up for customers like me?
Research payment preferences in your target markets. Shopify Payments supports many local payment methods; enable the relevant ones for each market. If Shopify Payments doesn’t support a critical method, explore third-party payment providers that do.
This matters most for high-value purchases where payment trust is crucial. A customer buying a €20 item might push through an unfamiliar payment flow. A customer buying a €200 item wants payment methods they recognize and trust.
A customer in France has a question about your product. They’ve browsed your beautifully translated French store. They email your support address and receive a response in English.
The experience breaks. Suddenly the French storefront feels like a facade over an operation that doesn’t really serve French customers. Trust evaporates. The sale that might have happened with a quick question answered doesn’t happen.
Customer service localization is difficult because it requires actual language capability, not just translated content. But ignoring it undermines all your other localization work.
At minimum, set clear expectations about support language. If you can only provide English support, say so somewhere customers can find before they reach out. Consider whether customers would prefer slower responses in their language over faster responses in English.
For higher-volume markets, explore native-language support options. This might mean hiring multilingual staff, using translation services for support tickets, or working with outsourced providers who cover your target languages.
Automated support – order tracking, returns processing, FAQ access – should be fully localized. These systems can be translated without requiring human language capability and handle the majority of routine inquiries.
Each of these mistakes individually might only cost you a small percentage of potential sales. But they compound. A customer hits untranslated images, then unexpected shipping costs, then unfamiliar payment options, then English-only support. Each friction point increases abandonment probability.
Merchants who succeed internationally address localization comprehensively. They recognize that international customers compare their store not just to local competitors but to other international stores that have done the work properly.
The good news: each gap is fixable. Image localization through dedicated apps. Price localization through Shopify Markets. Shipping transparency through clear communication. Payment options through platform configuration. Support through process and prioritization.
None of this requires rebuilding your store. Each gap requires recognizing the problem and implementing a solution. Done systematically, these fixes transform an international store that technically works into one that actually converts.
Ready to start closing your localization gaps? Begin with image localization – install Product Image Translate Easy and eliminate the visual disconnect that undermines your translation investment.