With the alignment of an eCommerce offer to different countries and languages, there are a lot of tasks that an eCommerce manager has to consider.
- Translate product data and categories into the respective target languages
- Align SEO marketing internationally
- Convert shop system to multilingualism
- Check the module extensions for compatibility
- Coordinate and optimize shipping and logistics
However, the special features of customer data abroad are often forgotten.
Here are 5 tips on how you should correctly enter addresses for domestic and foreign countries:
1. observe mandatory data for different countries
Addresses have a different address format in many countries. In Great Britain, for example, the postal code consists of 2 parts. The first part indicates the city/town, the second the more precise address. For smaller English towns, the relevant county is included in the address.
The situation is similar in the Netherlands. Here opposite houses on different sides of the street have different postal codes.
Give your customers the possibility to store the corresponding data for all countries and label the fields accordingly. Otherwise the data will be entered randomly and various fields will be misused. This often leads to chaos in your merchandise management system.
2. multilingual countries
Many European countries are multilingual. In Belgium, for example, Dutch, French or German is spoken in some areas.
Also offer customers the option to change the language of the webshop or the forms within a country. You can query and automate quite a bit via the browser settings, but a manual selection and override should still be possible. Google Translate is not active everywhere and may not always be the best way to translate product descriptions. For this, we rather recommend professionals, such as our colleagues from Eurotext in Würzburg.
3. optimize your registration forms
Customer data is the oil of e-commerce. The better your customer data and the 360-degree view of your users, the more you can respond to customers and tailor your offer to their needs.
To do this, you should design the input fields as optimally as possible and perhaps consider using hidden fields to store extended information such as the store language set, the user's origin, or device information (desktop, mobile, tablet). The motto is as few fields as possible, as many as necessary, in line with the DSGVO requirements for data economy. It is therefore worth planning your marketing activities per country and comparing them with the collected data ahead of time.
4. enrich data - avoid unnecessary fields
Customer data is the oil of e-commerce. The better your customer data and the 360-degree view of your users, the more you can respond to customers and tailor your offer to their needs.
To do this, you should design the input fields as optimally as possible and perhaps consider using hidden fields to store extended information such as the store language set, the user's origin, or device information (desktop, mobile, tablet). The motto is as few fields as possible, as many as necessary, in line with the DSGVO requirements for data economy. It is therefore worth planning your marketing activities per country and comparing them with the collected data ahead of time.
5. normalize data and eliminate duplicates
Address data with different spellings is often stored by the same customer via different channels. Especially in multichannel, or omnichannel e-commerce, via different touchpoints to the customer, this happens very often. This leads to costs for duplicate addressing by mail or e-mail and also annoys your customers, who receive everything twice.
An example:
Mr. Müller calls via the call center and places an order.
The customer support agent looks for the customer, can't find him, and puts him on. Communicating the address over the phone is not so easy, and quickly "-", spaces, or street, str. or street are entered randomly.
The days of a single e-mail address are long gone, and quickly the same customer registers in the web store, this time with the correct spelling and a different e-mail.
If the customer then places an order anonymously in the store, without a customer card and a query in the system, duplicates are inevitable. If you could also send the invoice to the customer by e-mail, or ask him for his address or phone number, it might be easier to merge the orders.
Using intelligent business rules and address matching, identical customers could be found and cleverly brought together. The more customer addresses a retailer has, the higher the savings potential. This is a necessary process, especially for multinational companies.
More tips and tools for problem solving are of course available from us. For B2C and B2B dealers.
