Site in different languages

[Gwhizz]

Has anyone converted their site to anothe rlanguage or several languages and seen an increase in sales? I'm thinking French and German?

Thanks

[chodges84]

I'm thinking about it.

French is number 1 on my list, primarily because the prices in France of my widgets are quite high. I would run it as a seperate site though, as in on a .fr domain name

[Gwhizz]

I was speaking to a successful UK business (multi-miilonaire) who's widgets have been sold worldwide since the 80s. He says he'd never set up a company with the idea of selling to a single country. He sold in the UK, Fance and Germany when he started out and when the UK was in recession France and Germany made sure he was still in business and vice versa. Now when he launches a new product it is sold in many languages at the same time. I guess there's no excuse for an e-commerce site to be english only. Am I right in thinking english sites only account for 48% of the web? I'll be going ahead as soon as I can.

[chodges84]

what accounts for the rest other 52% mandarin is the most widely spoken language, but I wouldn't know how highly it ranks on theweb.

I imagine Frech, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic might rank highly, but i'm no linguist.

[RailMan]

>>Has anyone converted their site to anothe rlanguage
>>or several languages and seen an increase in sales?

a friend of mine has multiple languages on his site - but only a small increase in sales
i think the problem is that he used online translation services so non-english speakers probably see pages full of gobbledegook .........
i would guess any increase in sales was due more to having more pages than having foreign languages!

[etechsupport]

Few outsourcing companies are doing this job in a very affordable rate.

[Aircut]

are you offering customer support and email response in those lang? if not what the point?

[gigalot]

We are considering doing our site in Spanish. However, we had not considered the point about offering support in those languages. Something to think about.