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What is the best shop building solution to create a multilingual book site with?
Are there anylinks I should look at?
Thanks for your help.
The basic bits of info would be
1) How many products in the shop? (nearest '000 or so)
2) Do you have a preference for hosting, ie IIS, Linux/Apache, custom host from s/ware provider etc?
3) Approx. budget? There are some very powerful tools out there, but the best ones tend to be expensive. Then again, there ar esome excellent free packages. It depends what you want to do exactly
4) Which languages? Plenty of shop builder solutions will deal with European languages, but once you get away from the Roman alaphabet, your options can narrow a bit
Spec:
Product Range:
Around 1000 multilingual books / products.
Hosting:
I currently have no preferred hosting
Budget:
As cheaply as possible upto 10K – is there anything in the free / cheap range thats worth a look?
Languages:
European:
English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Portuguese, Polish, Serbo-Croat, Welsh, Albanian
Mid Eastern:
Arabic, Farsi, Turkish
South Asian:
Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Panjabi, Tamil, Urdu
Far Eastern:
Chinese, Simplified Chinese (pinyin), Japanese, Hmong, Korean, Vietnamese
African:
Somali, Twi, Yoruba
Most of the European languages are easy enough, as is Japanese, Chinese and Arabic, but Yoruba? I'd never even heard of it before.
In order for a single e-comm site to handle all of these, you will need double byte encoding to cope with the character based languages (Chinese, Japanese)
The only realistic way I can see is to separate out the e-commerce and language handling facilities. It'll be a pain, having to write/maintain multiple front ends, but unless you cut the number of languages to exclude the more unusual ones, I think its the only way to do it. If you can find a template driven e-commerce package that allows you to customise everything, and you can get translators for all of these languages, you may be alright
To fulfil that list, I think its going to be custom, and EXPENSIVE, I think you'll bust 10k easy
The main problem is economic. Some of these language groups are quite small, and have very low Interent connection rates, so the potential market is small, although granted takeup would probably be quite good
Taking Welsh as an example though, there are almost no Welsh speakers to start with, and virtually all of them speak English too, at least as a second language. I suppose real hardcore Plaid Cymru types woud like it, but then you are still only looking at the subset that buys online
The bilingual bookshop is going to support a literacy program - which is partly why theres so many languages I need to support.
The books are specifically designed for and targeted at schools, education establishments, aid agencies and non-government organisations who teach children and refugees from a wide variety of countries and cultures who have generally been displaced by war, economic migrantcy and /or their parents work relocation into a new country, language and culture.
Were also located in the UK and its just good practice to support Welsh. It also aids our funding.
