SEO ecommerce translations

Do you have an online shop and want to expand your business to Italy? Maybe you want to sell your products both in your shop and on Amazon. And to do this, you need to translate your texts into Italian.

Your ecommerce journey – a bumpy ride (so far)

I know how you feel. You’ve probably had a rough journey, both in terms of time and money. At first, you might have thought it would be quite easy: you could just use Google Translate, right? But you didn’t get the results you were hoping for. You sold very few products and on top of that you got furious customers demanding a refund because the products were not as the (automatically translated) description promised.

Someone then suggested you might want to use a translation agency. Great idea! You reached out to some and got a few quotes. They recommended post-editing: a translator would simply “edit” the texts after they had been translatedby a machine. You agreed on that, but your products still didn’t sell.

Now the agency suggested they would ask a translator to translate your texts directly, rather than editing a machine translation. You trusted the agency, so you decided to give it a try. Still, your products just didn’t become a big hit in Italy. Well, you might have thought, maybe they are not suited to the Italian audience.

Ecommerce translations that just won’t work – why is that?

Let me help you find out where the problem lies.

The issue is your products don’t sell because the descriptions are not optimised for Amazon. As it happens, Amazon has a search algorithm that works more or less like Google’s. You might know that if you want to rank on the first search result page when a user searches for something, your texts need to be attractive for Google. Same goes for Amazon.

If a translator doesn’t specialise in ecommerce, they won’t know your product descriptions need to be optimised for Amazon. And they might not even understand the need for the texts to be engaging, which implies the need to avoid literal translations.

Hire a translator specialised in ecommerce!

Luckily, there is a solution. And you are in the right place for that.

Thanks to my 12 years’ experience as an ecommerce translator, two of which were as an in-house translator at Amazon EU, I know your texts need to be optimised for search engines and that you need to use SEO to do so. But this is not enough: they also need to be compelling for the Italian audience. To achieve this, you might have to re-write them rather than just translate them. That is, you might need to adapt them to your target audience. What works in the UK or the US won’t necessarily work in Italy, because the Italian audience won’t understand some cultural references, for instance.

This means you need a translator who specialises in ecommerce, SEO and what we call “transcreation”, that is, a mix of translation and copywriting aimed at engaging Italian customers. Drop me a line to find out how I can help you!