International ECommerce Website

bigalk

hi guys,

i operate a line of business which has potential to be marketed all over Europe and the middle east, and i am trying to find a (not hugely expensive) solution to handle the tweaks needed.

To explain the details - lets pretend i sell a range of kayaks.

Tweak 1)
i want to market the same kayaks in each country, but i want the ranges locally named. for example, in Ireland the kayaks might be called Shannon, Erne, Blackwater. In the Uk the same items are named Thames, Tyne, Severn. In Germany they would be called Rhine, Weser etc

I know that i can set up each separate domain and tell the google bots that all sites are one and the same, and thus no SEO duplication complications. Can anyone tell me if what i am proposing here will cause other difficulties, and what they might be?

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how i can sell the same products, working off the same inventory, but make them have different names depending on the locality of the user? Would this cause SEO mayhem for me?

Tweak 2)
The majority of my sales will be in Ireland and the UK and i have registered kayaks.ie and kayaks.co.uk (along with kayaks.com). further down the line i intend to register kayaks.de, kayaks.fr etc etc. My url is pretty unique and i dont see any probs here.

I want to sell these items in the Ireland at price A, in the UK at price B, in Europe at price C, and the rest of the world at price D. In Ireland and UK shipping will be free, and all other areas there will be a shipping charge.

How might i handle this? For example lego.com does a really good job of 'forcing' your locality at checkout stage, even though (being from Ireland) you might try and sneak through a £STG sale, where it is much cheaper. How do they achieve this?

I have put in a lot of hours research but cant seem to find an out of the box solution. Shopify was my initial preferrred route but seems to fall pretty flat when it somes to internationalisation.

any thoughts and comments much appreciated!

Best regards,
Alan

tricky D

Tweak 1 sounds like a really bad idea to me. You're diluting the product branding by neglecting the international nature of commerce and product marketing information flows. Eg. imagine people on social media talking about your products, there'll be loads of brand confusion across geo borders on a medium without such borders = bad. There's a very small possibility it might just work for your specific product range, but if kayaks is a half decent analogy, it's a really bad idea. That's all before even considering the significant SEO dilution.

There should be a few cart solutions which should be able to handle issue 2 on a single site. Iirc ZenCart can do something like this. There should be others. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_shopping_cart_software for directions.

bigalk

Hi Tricky,

and thanks for the response. lets talk window frames instead of kayaks.

the main reason i want to employ tweak 1 is that the UK will be my primary market. i have a very strong reasons to believe that the use of local branding will greatly increase sales:
- Affinity / familiarity with the local name. these products are widely available in the UK and abroad (but very poorly marketed) and I dont want to put potential customer off with the prospect of an intentional company, for something they would normally source locally
- so talking window frames, lets say i were to call them London and Edinburgh. I was hoping that searches for window frames, returning a UK url, with a range name like London would encourage sales for Uk customers.

Does this make any more sense, or do you still think i am on the wrong track.

Al

tricky D

From looking at a few similar product types: bathroom accessories, storage heaters, wood products, they mainly use generic names. There might also be B2B international community considerations. Adding to that, there might be SEO issues in relation to using location based words. Without more info and only cursory thinking about the matter, I would still think trying to split the brand in the way you are thinking raises issues probably better avoided.

/my 2cent

TsuDhoNimh

bigalk wrote: »

I know that i can set up each separate domain and tell the google bots that all sites are one and the same, and thus no SEO duplication complications. Can anyone tell me if what i am proposing here will cause other difficulties, and what they might be?

The problem here isn't 'just' duplication issues (and there are significant duplication issues that this would cause, it isn't as simple as 'tell the bots they're all the same site and no complications'), it's more so the dilution of your marketing efforts across the various sites.

In some, or even many, cases the benefits of having the local TLD and the local customisation is more than worth the additional effort required (it's the best case scenario from an SEO point of view), but it does mean that you'd be looking at running a variety of unique sites (it isn't as simple as duplicating the content and making minor geographical tweaks if you want to do it right) and marketing each one (so a significant increase in your marketing budget).

bigalk wrote: »

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how i can sell the same products, working off the same inventory, but make them have different names depending on the locality of the user? Would this cause SEO mayhem for me?

From a development point of view, this shouldn't be a major problem. Depending on what CMS you're using your developer should be able to provide a working solution to this using the IP address of the visitor (or various other geo signals) to customise the content to the visitor.

It wouldn't cause 'mayhem' from an SEO point of view, but it would have a significant negative impact and require additional work to achieve the results you'd want. Again, you'd basically be marketing each individual 'name' as a unique page so diluting your marketing effort across a variety of URLs instead of on a single (and therefore far more authoritative) page.

The biggest impact would be the branding issue(s) it would cause though not the SEO impact, as Tricky mentioned already. For that reason alone it's something I'd personally advise against in any (theoretical) case I can think of. Perhaps your situation could be an exception to that, but I can't see any situation which would make this the best route to take.

Locers

I am not an expert in branding buy I think you can develop your own brand in any counrty if its not taken already and you have budget big enough to handle with it.
As an examples I will bring out our Irish Penneys (Primark in UK) or ice creams HB (Algida in many other countries) etc.
It is crucial for any ecommerce business to target local audience I would sugest to go for local/country keywords.
You will not get customers in Czech for example, where kayaks are call kajaky or in Russia каяки
I would also say you do not need to set up many websites in many countries, but it would be an advantage. The site you wish to develop should be multilingual and here is some example
http://www.thomann.de/es/index.html
Then you will need to find SEO company that will help you acheive google top search results in certain countries.

TsuDhoNimh

Locers wrote: »

It is crucial for any ecommerce business to target local audience I would sugest to go for local/country keywords.
You will not get customers in Czech for example, where kayaks are call kajaky or in Russia каяки

Completely agree with everything Locers said... but in the context of a proposed change in the branding of individual products, especially to a (at least in the example given) brand that carries semantic geolocational meaning, it's a very different story.

Yes, target the content to the local market and optimise it for the same, but doing so in a way that evokes an extremely competitive and semantically unrelated niche (if the OPs example of the city names is accurate) is certainly not an ideal way to do it.

bigalk wrote: »

- so talking window frames, lets say i were to call them London and Edinburgh. I was hoping that searches for window frames, returning a UK url, with a range name like London would encourage sales for Uk customers.

This has the potential to be a positive, the recognisable names would have a positive impact on customer behaviour, but also has the potential to be negative.

If I go to search for one of the specific window brands that you offer "London window" I'm going to be given results based on a local intent algorithm based on the semantic meaning of the keyphrase, meaning you'll be competing on a universal/blended results page comprising mainly of local/map listings along with the normal competition for that phrase. The competition and difficulty you will face in trying to compete for that term will be exponentially more difficult than if you were competing for "<generic brand name / local name but without the geolocational impact> window".

This may not be a big deal depending on your overall marketing plan for the business, I'm not sure how prevalent it is for someone to search for a specific 'window brand' (or more accurately whatever it is your actual product is), where the overall brand of the business might be far more relevant and important than the individual product brands (which I assume will be the case, given your choice to go with diverse individual brands in this manner).

bigalk wrote: »

Does this make any more sense, or do you still think i am on the wrong track.

None of us can really say for sure it's the right call or the wrong call without having the specific details, sadly. There's simply no 'one size fits all' solution.

Take a look at the various issues that have been pointed out in the thread (ask for more information if there's any of it that's unclear), come up with your best list of pros and cons relating to your specific situation with those issues in mind (along with any/all others you can come up with given it's your area of expertise and you know the details) and you'll be best placed to make a decision on if it's the right move or not.

bigalk

hi guys,

thanks for all the responses, im still digesting them. my main reasons for the locally named ranges is the UK market.

TsuDhoNimh - point well made re SEO competing geographically.
right now i think i am going to launch two sites. one for the UK with local names (Buckingham and Windsor are more than likely what i would call the ranges - im trying to put across a palatial theme). i think this might negate much of the downside of the strategy, when the place name used will still generate familiarity from the customer, but narrows the geographic context dramatically.

second site to cover the rest of the world.

sites will be totally independent. same products but different SEO strategy, different range names / images / descriptions / prices etc.

ill be back with further comments when god puts a few more hours in the day.

thanks again everyone - all your points have been extremely relevant and appreciated

My best,
Alan