Overview

Internationalization in an e-commerce context is the means of adapting to different languages, currencies, regional differences and other technical requirements of your target markets.

In a SAP Commerce Cloud context, this means that the solution will be available in more than just one country or region. This page summarizes challenges and recommended practices to enable the solution to be available in multiple countries or regions.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The internationalization decisions start with a good understanding of the business logic and the requirements for a country or region-specific data. In some cases, the data and business logic might be common for all countries or regions and the focus is on the localization of the content. In other cases, you need to consider if the following should be country or region specific or if common to all markets:

• Product assortment and product content
• Web Content Management System (WCMS)
• Customers
• Parts of the business processes such as tax calculation or order fulfillment
• Front-end processes such as checkout or customer registration
  • Different payment options
  • Different fields to capture
  • Different required field

In addition, internationalization brings complexity in the following areas:

• Making sure the customer is using the correct storefront
• Support for multiple languages, currencies, address formats
• Content needs to be translated as part of the standard activities after going live

You also need to consider deployment architecture and decide if you have regional data centers that reduce latency for the end customers or if you use a single data center with a distributed Content Delivery Network (CDN).

There is of course also project delivery complexities to a global project requiring internationalization, but this is not covered on this page.

• Development teams could be in different countries or regions
• Code base could be region specific
• International rollout
  • Should you have a phased approach?
  • Should you start with the most complex or least complex market first?

Overall, it is important to ensure your requirements account for internationalization in the specific areas below. You need to be specific about where it will be supported, globally or locally. It is important to realize that for each of the considerations, it is not a one size fits all, each one may be very different for each region as displayed in the following table:

Customer

Customer behaviors vary across geographies. Buying patterns and decision-making factors can be completely different in different regions. To successfully attract customers, you need to take into consideration different aspects of customer behaviors and preferences and understand target customer segments and journeys. When determining the potential of the market and customer profiles, the following aspects should be taken into considerations:

• Internet penetration and bandwidth availability
• Internet buying population
• Income and social classes
• Customer shopping preferences (price sensitivity, promotions, content quality)
• Internet buying preferences (categories bought online)
• Target customer segments
• Buying journeys (funnels) for target segments
• Visual and device preferences (mobile first, media representation)

Once you have established which regions you will support, it is also important to determine how you will assign a customer to a region. The most common way is by the billing address. However, other business logic such as IP address could also be implemented.

Language and Local

In a multi-country SAP Commerce Cloud implementation, each new supported language requires a content preparation strategy. The following topics need to be considered:

• Determine the languages you will support in each of the regions where your solution will be available.
• Determine the page templates used for the commerce channel. It may be common templates across countries or each country may have their own set of templates or a combination of both (see more in the "Web Content" section below).
• Plan the content management process. It may be centralized or country-based content management.
• The language-specific content should be prepared using a professional translation team. It is also preferable to have a legal review on critical contents. This should be accounted for as part of your publication workflow.
• The default language would usually be the language predominantly used in the region. However, the customer should have the option to select another language.

You'll find details about encoding, UI element localization, and more in Internationalization and Localization.

Business Processes

Several business processes can be region specific. Typical examples are:

• Solr
  • Different languages need to be properly set up, including stop words, synonyms and server configuration.
• Prices
  • If internationalization of prices is managed in SAP Commerce Cloud, expect complex rules around currency conversions, rounding, markups, and markdowns.
• Taxes
  • Some markets (for example, USA) have complex tax system where taxes are usually calculated by third-party providers (for example, Avalara). As you need to pay for the service, it is important to limit calls to the tax calculation service. Typically, this would only be used in the checkout process.
  • Other markets have a simple tax system which can be managed inside SAP Commerce Cloud.
  • In some countries, it is custom or mandatory to show the tax amount in the checkout process. In other countries, the tax is shown only on the invoice.
  • For cross-border shipping, customs needs to be taken into consideration.
• Promotions
  • The business requirements should determine whether promotions will be done on a global level or will be managed locally.
  • Each country and the country’s business unit may follow different pricing strategies based on customer buying behavior. It may be based on cost-based pricing, market-based pricing, dynamic pricing and others.
  • Different types of promotions specific for individual markets need to be taken in consideration.
  • Understanding the price sensitivity of specific markets is needed. Some markets are looking for discounts when buying online while some buy online due to convenience, thus are more flexible on prices.
  • Specific regulations regarding pricing need to be analyzed. Regulations in some countries may impose that showing the pricing denomination is essential or that certain elements cannot be discounted (for example, tax cannot be discounted in the USA).
• Payment
  • Different markets may support different payment options (cash on demand, bank transfer, credit, debit, gift card, e-wallets)
  • Most payment providers can handle multiple regions with the same merchant ID. However, always double check during the design phase.
• Shipping
  • Factor in different delivery types (address delivery, click and collect, lockers and more)
  • Acceptable delivery speeds may differ per region (same day delivery, standard shipping and more).
  • Cost of delivery may be important in some regions (free delivery versus paid delivery).
  • The out-of-the-box delivery calculation (deliveryzone extension) is unlikely to meet the needs of a multi-region project and a custom FindDeliveryCostStrategyimplementation will be required.
• Order fulfillment
  • The order fulfillment process, returns, refunds and more could be different per region which can also be impacted by legal reasons. For example, customers are allowed to return goods in a given period or time. The time period could differ from region to region. Also, the restocking fee is not always permitted in all regions.
• Social Media
  
  • Used for marketing, ratings and reviews, customer service, analytics.
    
  • Each region may have their own unique popular social media channels and laws around using it. Consider the popular channels of the regions that you will engage with.
  • Online stores should plan their social commerce strategy with the popular channels. For example, in the USA, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest are the most popular channels. In China, however, popular social channels involved in e-commerce are Pinduoduo and WeChat.
• Customer Support

  • Customer support operations can be handled centrally or locally. While having customer support centrally and not supporting all languages will probably reduce the customer satisfaction rate, it will also lower your costs.

  • You will need to decide on which languages and through which channels you will provide customer service.

  • Besides supporting traditional channels such as e-mail and telephone, you may also need to analyze and support country-specific customer support channels. For example, live chat, support agent co-browsing sessions or market specific social networks.

We recommend as a practice to have regional business processes orchestrated using some internationalization service. The service does not exist in the out-of-box code yet but should provide a central repository for all region specific business logic. Each time a region requires different handling, the service should be called as opposed to the code cluttered with numerous if() else if() statements to determine the logic to execute for the current region.

Product Content

Product content for different regions can be stored in the same catalog or in separate catalogs. Combining both approaches is common. Some countries can share one catalog while others require a dedicated product catalog.

Web Content

The main question here is how many sites do you want to maintain? Again, a combined approach is recommended and is supported through the Multi-Country Site features in SmartEdit. Some regions require dedicated catalogs while others could share the catalogs. Special attention should be given to the BaseStore - Catalog relation. Typically, there would be a catalog for each BaseStore. However, depending on business requirements, you can also have multiple catalogs for each BaseStore (for example, catalog for categories, catalog for media, multiple product catalogs) or a catalog shared by multiple BaseStores.

Deployment Architecture

The following issues need to be taken into account when considering the deployment architecture. Go to "Where in the World Is Your SAP Commerce Cloud Instance?" for more on instance strategy.

Conclusion

This article introduced you to the fundamental challenges of internationalization. If you want to find out more about how you can implement any of these considerations in your SAP Commerce Cloud solution, please contact SAP Expert Services.