Localisation: Preparing Your Online Shop to Sell Abroad
Localising an online shop for a new international market can be more challenging than you think. Here are a few things to consider.
You probably already know and use a couple of Google tools to optimise your online shop. Another free tool offered by Google is Grow My Store. As you might imagine, this tool aims to help online shop owners improve their users’ shopping experience.
Grow My Store performs an assessment of online shops and creates a report offering recommendations for shop owners to improve the customers' shopping experience and therefore accelerate the development of their business.
Source: Grow My Store
This Google tool allows you to optimise your shop, using up to 22 metrics based on best user experience practices.
These metrics take into account important factors such as:
- Are there customer reviews?
- Are enough payment methods offered?
- Is your website easy to navigate through?
- Is HTTPS integrated?
- Is a return policy present?
- Is the website mobile friendly?
Recommended reading:
Why are Shoppers Leaving Your Online Shop?
How does Grow My Store work?
First of all, you will need to enter your online shop’s URL in the bar on the Grow My Store webpage.
In order to be shown relevant recommendations for your business, Google will ask you to select your business type: is your shop online only, offline only, or both?
And that's basically it!
After having provided Google with the required information, Grow My Store will then calculate the full report for your online shop.
Recommended reading:
New Google Tool: Rising Retail Categories
Just click on "Get my full report" to see the results of your shop’s evaluation. It’s worth noting that the tool may need a bit of time to complete the report. It will take anywhere from half an hour to a couple hours to complete this task.
While Google is checking your online shop, you can already take a look at some personal recommendations in terms of product search or social media:
Once the report has been created, Google will send you a link via mail to inform you about it. Take a look at it to see the score you received.
There are four scoring levels: beginner (0-25%), basic (25-50%), medium (50-75%) and advanced (75-100%). The score is calculated taking into account the detailed analysis of the results shown to you in the report:
By clicking on one of the categories shown in the screenshot above, you will receive recommendations related to that category. For example, one of the tips related to the category “product information” is to add product reviews to your online shop, as they help to increase your conversions:
The purpose of this Google tool is to analyse whether a shop (online or offline) meets the most common requirements that consumers expect during their shopping experience.
This report might reveal some aspects or issues that you haven’t considered before.
To give examples based on the data offered by Statista, some of the most common reasons for shopping cart abandonment are:
- 39% of UK online shoppers cancelled their orders because of the delivery charge.
- 27% of shoppers abandoned their cart because the shop didn’t have the item in stock.
Shutterstock/RachenArt
Conclusion
Google’s Grow My Store is a useful tool that can really help SMEs to find out which aspects work well in their (online or offline) shop and which ones need improvement. This tool is both easy to use and free of charge! That’s why using it to perform an analysis of your website is definitely recommended!
This article was originally published on and adapted from our Italian blog: Grow My Store: lo strumento gratuito di Google che ottimizza il tuo negozio
28/11/22
