Sometimes an offer comes along that looks astonishingly attractive and Paypal Global Sellers, which they’ve launched in conjunction with Webinterpret, does almost seem too good to be true. The offer is decent: PayPal and WebInterpret say they can get your webstore ready for international sales, in multiple countries, in a week. For nothing.
The specific claim is: “Launch your store in over 60 countries and double your international sales with our simple Plug & Play solution and the PayPal Global Sellers program.” If you’re already using Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and Bigcommerce all you need to do is bag the special plugin and install it into your webstore provider.
This video explains it:
The service will translate your listings and store content, convert the currency, and also help you with fulfilment, even handling overseas shipping and customs and duties too. It will apparently take about one week for Webinterpret to create your localised stores. And that’s where the other benefits will kick in: with your sales being made available in local languages and local currencies, you should get a serious search engine boost.
Shoppers from across the world will be able to search, shop and pay for items in their own local language and currency. Having a localized version not only boosts the SEO of your stores in different regions around the world, but the plug in will push shoppers to your local offerings in their local language if they stumble upon it. If an Italian shopper finds your UK shop, they’ll be sent to your Italian one, for instance.
The success of this scheme lies with the implementation. It will depend on the quality of translation and how well they can render your US or UK store in English to the needs of 60 other cultures. And, of course, you might not be able to judge how good the language translations are. So there is a decent amount of trust required.
It’s currently free and available to PayPal merchants using a compatible web store offering based in the USA and the UK. It sounds like a good scheme, so we’ll be very interested to hear from you if you take the plunge and have a go. Please report back.
19 Responses
Sounds great, but talking of translations and webinterpret’s capability to translate, I recently had two Amazon sales in Italy that were packs of a charm.
I rarely get issues re webinterpret but sadly the translation was incorrect and only when I received messages from both buyers did it become apparent that the translation was wrong. They were expecting more in the packs than I sent. Webinterpret held up their hands and said no problem they will refund me.
Two and a half months later I am still chasing them for the refund. Does make me wonder if they are capable of your above article.
We used Webinterpret for years with eBay, till we dropped our featured store due to decline in eBay sales on the international sites. We never had much of an issue with the translation services.
This however looks very good, as long as they can work with our platform we will maybe give this a shot the vast majority of our direct sales are EU anyway.
Unfortunately my experience to date with the service has been far from positive. We were contacted directly about the service and as you say it sounds very good (and I think/hope that it will be) so we signed up. The initial process was all very smooth until we got to the point where the store was sent through for approval and it was a bit of a jumble with most products missing and a few products that were marked as ‘not visible’ on BigCommerce showing!
I was told that this was due to a problem with the BigCommerce integration and that the store wouldn’t be launched. A few weeks later I hadn’t heard anything so I chased it up and was told that it had been fixed and was in testing. We then made some changes to the code that we had installed on our BC store and I was told that I would be contacted in a few days to get approval for the store to go live. I didn’t hear anything but before I had a chance to chase then we were contacted via Facebook by a customer in Taiwan who had ordered through our Glopal store. She contacted us because she hadn’t received a confirmation of her order and I’m glad she did as neither had we! We were subsequently contacted by another person that had ordered from America and again neither they, or we had received a confirmation of the order despite payment having been made.
I contacted Webinterpret and they could see both orders but apparently something wasn’t working properly between our BC store and the Glopal version. It particularly annoyed me that I kept getting told that it wasn’t their fault as they were reliant on another company for the integration!
The American order had to be cancelled as apparently there hadn’t been a charge for shipping generated but the Taiwan order was ok to be sent to the Skynet hub in the UK from where it would be forwarded. Please bear in mind that we received the order on the 20th of June, we sent it by Parcelforce24 on the 21st of June and after endless chasing and providing tracking numbers then only TODAY (12th July) has it been confirmed that it is on the Skynet system and starting it’s journey to Taiwan!
I’m sorry – I wasn’t intending to write an essay but it has been extremely frustrating and I guess I needed to let it out! I believe that this could be an excellent opportunity and the fact that we have received a couple of orders with the store not looking great and only live for a brief period seems to back that up. I fully understand that there will often be teething problems but it is the difficulty in getting problems resolved in a timely and acceptable manner that is the real issue here.
Rant over!
Steve
We’ve tried to use this service with our Bigcommerce store. However as it’s fed from ChannelAdvisor the orders and inventory fail to make the transition to CA. Webinterpret haven’t helped by re-activating it without notifying us. The first we hear is unhappy customers asking why we haven’t shipped their goods. Very messy so far and no date for rectifying the fault/s.
We were also contacted by PayPal to arrange a chat with this company, we went ahead, watched a demo of the system then though we would go ahead with this and see how it goes.
Just before I did this, I did a quick Google of webinterpt and I am glad I did. The reviews across all the major review sites are shocking. Poor customer service. Sending products live with wrong descriptions even when been made aware.
Heck the list goes on and on. I would advise everyone who are looking to use this service to also take a look at the reviews before making the jump.
I am fully aware people who have a poor service complain. And those who don’t, don’t…. but people who also have a good service also do leave good reviews. But trying to find one of these is like looking for a needle in a hey stack it really was.
Just spend 5min on google and you will see
Needless to say after reading some of these shocking reviews leading to companies having accounts with amazon and eBay suspended we decided not to go down this route and drop it like a hot patato.
I checked a box in my account preferences to indicate that i was “interested” in international sales. This apprently gives Webinterpret the authority to go into my ebay account with no communication with me and start converting my items into different countries of their choice.
500 listings later they had wrongly interpreted EVERY LISTING. Every one! Every single one! I could not believe the incompetence. Also some of our products are not suitable for international distribution. Plastered all over ebay Italy, Germany Spain etc.,
When I tried to contact them I couldn’t get through without an account (which i had not set up).
Had to get eBay to sort it out. They were very helpful.
When I finally did get hold of Webinterpret weeks later they tried to justify their actions.
Speaking for myself I would AVOID AVOID AVOID this company. Their disregard to my account and the wrong interpretation and conversions x 500 simply made me angry. I couldn’t believe that they could get access simply by me clicking a tick box in my account preferences.
I do hear some sellers have had positive experiences but I am definitely not one of them. I would do your research before considering – even for their free or trial service.
Anyone got a store that its actually live on, their own or otherwise? I visited the two examples on the site via a proxy and didn’t see any sign of local content, which don’t bode well, cheers !