Your product sells well at home. You have loyal customers, good reviews, a good conversion rate. All in all: a setup that works. That gives you the right push to look at expansion and how to take your products abroad. You might even see demand from other markets that fit perfectly with your product.

But a product that sells at home can still struggle abroad. In most cases, the product is not the problem.

The problem is everything around it. The customer in Germany or the Netherlands does not see your track record from home. They see a shop that is missing a lot of small things, and that is often enough for them to leave your site again.

That gap is what localisation is meant to close. We sat down with our Danish Market Lead, Kahlina Raben Cordsen, to talk localisation, and the do’s and don’ts every brand should know before taking their products abroad. 

Here is what you need to know.

What is localisation?
Localisation means your customers feel they are buying from a local brand. Whether they are on your website, talking to customer service or opening your newsletter, it should feel like they can relate to and understand the massages.

Language is part of it. So are the details, like how prices are shown, which payment options you offer and how your parcels reach the customer. 

And then there is the cultural layer. A local does not only speak the language. They know the calendar too: which holidays matter, when people shop for them and what they expect to see. Mother’s Day is a good example. In Denmark, it falls on the second Sunday in May. In Sweden, it is the last Sunday in May, in Norway it is in February and in the UK it is in March. If your Mother’s Day campaign goes out on the same date in every market, you are either too early or too late in most of them.

These details have a direct impact on your campaigns and a big say in how you communicate with your customers. Get the timing wrong, and you miss the moment when your customers in Sweden, Germany or the Netherlands are ready to buy.

You are not competing on equal terms

So back to this: why a product that sells at home can still struggle abroad.

When you enter a new market, you meet local competitors with years of advantages built up. They have the market share and the brand recognition. They have the recruitment base, the language skills and the local marketing knowledge. And they understand their customers’ culture without having to think about it.

When you enter that market, the picture looks very different. Almost everything requires focus at once.

Some of those gaps take years to close. You will not match a local competitor’s market share or brand recognition in your first quarter. But language, cultural understanding and local marketing knowledge are gaps you can close from day one, with the right people.

The closer you get to feeling local, the more room your product has to win on its own merits.

Do it right from the beginning

The common approach in e-commerce is to find as many distributors as possible, so you can ship to the whole world. The problem is that you often end up with quantity rather than quality.

In a new market, you get one shot with a potential customer. If they leave because of the way your prices are set up, or because they do not trust the payment method, you do not get a second chance. The customer does not complain. They just leave.

A translation can be correct and still sound wrong. A delivery option can be the obvious choice in one country and a dealbreaker in the next.

Delivery is localisation too

Delivery shows how different two markets can be.

In Denmark, picking up your parcel at a pickup point is completely normal.

Most Danes know which points are near them and which ones are open late. Many also know the frustration of waiting at home all day for a parcel, only to get a notification saying “you were not home” when you were. The parcel then ends up at a pickup point you did not choose, because the locker at your local supermarket was full. So it sits at a central location a few annoying extra kilometres away. Danes have learned to work around this, and many simply choose a pickup point from the start.

In the Netherlands, home delivery is the default. It is not a nice-to-have. It is what customers expect, and many also expect to choose a delivery time slot. If your checkout only offers pickup points, Dutch customers might go for another local competitor that can deliver and who delivers to their door.

None of this shows up in a logistics plan. Your setup might easily get you to the Netherlands. Localisation is about knowing the small details that make Dutch customers choose you once you are there.

Payment and customer service follow the same logic

Many Dutch shoppers expect to be able to pay after delivery. If everything has to be paid upfront in checkout, you risk scaring a lot of them away. With Danish eyes, that can look like an old-fashioned way of doing business, just like invoice payment in Germany. But it is part of how people shop in those markets, and ignoring it costs you conversions.

The same goes for customer service. Some customer groups are perfectly happy with an English-speaking AI chatbot. Others expect local phone support so they can get answers in their own language. What is right depends on your brand, your product and your customers. That is where our native specialists come in. They guide you towards the setup that fits the market you want to succeed in.

The do's of localisation

• Use local specialists, not only machines. AI is fast and handles large volumes well. That is also how we operate when it comes to repetitive tasks and questions. But a native specialist knows how shoppers in their market think and which phrasing sounds natural. Use AI for speed and local knowledge to win the customer.

• Build a glossary early. Decide from the start how your key terms should be translated in each language, and stick to it. Is it “children” or “kids”? What do you call your product categories? Which product names stay in English? A glossary keeps your language consistent across your webshop, customer service and campaigns, and it saves a lot of corrections later on.

• Adapt campaigns to local dates, events and culture. Your campaign calendar should not be a copy of the Danish one. In the Netherlands, Sinterklaas on 5 December is a big gift-giving moment, and many shoppers buy their presents before Christmas is even on the agenda. Every market has dates like that. 

The don'ts of localisation

• Do not machine translate without review. Machine translation without a native check is where most of the embarrassing mistakes happen. Wrong terms and odd phrasing make product descriptions and other texts less convincing. The customer might understand them, but they will not be persuaded to buy.

   

• Do not translate slogans and wordplay directly. A clever line in Danish rarely survives a direct translation. Wordplay depends on the language it was written in. Slogans need to be rewritten for the market.

   

• Do not assume the Nordics are one market. Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway are very different. Customers prefer different payment methods, and the languages are not the same. “Rolig” means calm in Danish but fun in Swedish. And Finnish is a different language family altogether. Treating the Nordics as one market is one of the most common mistakes we see brands make when they expand from Denmark.

The takeaway: make it feel local, and your product can sell abroad

A product that sells at home rarely struggles abroad because the product is wrong. It struggles because the customer never finds out how good it is. They leave at the delivery options or at the payment step.

At home, you never had to think about these things. Your customers already trusted you, and you already knew how they shop. In a new market, you have to earn that trust from scratch, against competitors who have it by default.

Localisation is how you close that gap. Get the details right, and your customers judge you on what made you successful at home in the first place: your product.

A local tip: Plan your campaigns around local moments

A good place to start is your campaign calendar. Our content calendar gives you the key dates, holidays and shopping moments across European markets, so you can plan communication that hits the right moment in each country.

Download the content calendar →

Not sure where your next market should be?
Let us talk about it →