One of the benefits of eCommerce is that you can sell anywhere in the world – of course, as long as you have the proper infrastructure in terms of IT, logistics, finances, legal, etc.
To achieve this, many international eCommerce operations find that they need to have different versions of their websites, in different languages.
The three most common ways of doing this goal:
By Country-Code Top-level Domain (ccTLD): you have a brand name (e.g. "Your Store") and different domains for each country or language (e.g. yourstore.co.uk, yourstore.de, yourstore.cz, and so on).
By subdomain: you have a "main" domain (e.g. yourstore.com) and different subdomains for each language (e.g. fr.yourstore.com, de.youstore.com, pt.yourstore.com, and so on).
By subdirectory: you have just one domain (e.g. yourstore.com) and offer different languages using subdirectories (e.g. yourstore.com/en, yourstore.com/de, yourstore.com/fr, and so on).
All strategies have their own advantages and disadvantages on which is not up to us to advise. What we will discuss here are the implications of each choice regarding integration with the edrone system.
The main point here is that you will need a separate edrone account for each domain or subdomain – in other words, the first two options (ccTLD or subdomains) require one account for each version of the website, and the third option (subdirectory) requires just one edrone account.
Well then, obviously the best choice, if you're going to work with edrone, is working with different languages through subdirectories, right? Not necessarily!
What is worth keeping in mind?
The main problem with having one account for different languages happens when you work with different currencies. For example, if you operate only in countries within the Eurozone, all your reports will show values in Euros and all is good. But if you operate in countries with different currencies, the edrone system will not be able to differentiate between them even if they are different on your website, since it only collects the raw value (e.g. the order value is "100" regardless of whether the currency is EUR, USD, PLN etc). Each edrone Workspace can only have one currency.
That's why, to keep things organized and ensure that your statistics are reliable, we recommend using different edrone accounts for different language versions.
This will also provide the additional benefit of helping you determine different strategies for different locations since customer behavior and sales performance will be different in each area.
And don't worry about having to create multiple accounts for the same employees, since the edrone Workspace allows your team members to each have just one edrone account, and have access to many different edrone Workspaces. Click here to learn more about edrone Workspaces.
Need more help?
If you have any further questions about working with multilingual websites on edrone, please do not hesitate to contact us at hello@edrone.me