eBay Improving User Experience on Their Websites with Translation

The online shopping experience must be as close as possible to the offline experience for an eCommerce store to succeed. However, since merchants can reach prospects from all across the world with their online stores, how can they provide a similar experience like a shopper would have at their local store?

Improve Shopper Experience with Translation
One way of improving a shopper’s experience is by providing information in their native language. eBay has realized this and is working to translate its websites to cater for the large percentage of users from outside the US. To begin, the site is working on translating its website in the countries where it currently operates such as Russia, Brazil, India, China and others.

The translation will improve user experience, which will ultimately mean people shop more at the site. At the time of writing, the translation has kicked off starting with product titles. However, it’s expected that other information such as the descriptions and tags will also be translated.

Translating Russian eBay Site
If you head over to the Russian site (simply Google “eBay Russia” to get to it), you will see some product titles are already translated while majority have not yet. However, if you place your cursor on any product title, you will see the translated version.

Users have an option to provide feedback on the accuracy of the translation. This feedback is important data that eBay engineers will use to ensure they are providing accurate translation tailored to shoppers in the specific regional eBay sites.

While there are auto translation tools that can speed up translation, the tools usually translate words mechanically and in effect lose their meaning. Moreover, some expressions mean different things across languages. Therefore, direct or automatic translation will not lead to the good shopper experience that eBay is looking for.

The translated information is expected to be given higher priority in user search results done on regional eBay sites. For instance, a Russian translated product will be given precedence over the same product available in English. This localization will go a long way to improve user experience.