Tariffs get the headlines, but global consumer intent has been remarkably durable across changes in trade policy. A 2022 ecommerce study from Flow found that 67% of online shoppers have made cross-border purchases, and plenty of small U.S. retailers are already seeing international traffic and orders without having run a single campaign abroad.
Larger U.S. retailers with global footprints have understood this for years, which is why they invest heavily in localized websites. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are catching up: according to a DHL survey of over 1,000 SMEs, more than half said international expansion was a priority. What has changed is that the barriers to acting on that priority have dropped considerably.
Easier Than It Was
A few years ago, the cost of going international was genuinely prohibitive for most SMEs. Getting a site ready for a new market meant hiring translators, web developers, marketing teams and market-entry consultants simultaneously. Today, platforms like Shopify Managed Markets, regional fulfillment networks, new international trade hubs (the UAE being a notable example) and AI-powered localization tools have compressed that cost significantly.
AI has been the biggest change, making website translation and localization faster and more affordable than any previous generation of tooling. But it’s also where overconfidence is most dangerous. AI tools can translate at scale; they can’t replace the market knowledge needed to make that translation actually convert.
The First Steps
Most retailers still treat localization as a compliance task, not a growth lever. The default framing is: translate the site, check the legal boxes, launch. That’s a mistake. The question isn’t whether visitors can read the page; it’s whether the page speaks to them in a way that builds trust and moves them toward a purchase.
The first step is market research, and AI tools alone won’t give you what you need here. Effective localization requires understanding colloquial language and slang, societal norms, and the cultural references that actually land with local audiences. For SEO, that also means adapting to how people in that market search, not just translating the keywords you already rank for at home.
Language matters more to purchasing behavior than many retailers expect. A long-running study from CSA Research found that 76% of online shoppers prefer to buy products with information in their native language; a more recent update surveying almost 10,000 consumers in 33 countries found that 40% will not purchase from sites in other languages at all. An analysis of 1.3 million citations we ran at Weglot found that untranslated websites miss out on up to 431% more citations compared to translated equivalents, and that adding full translations boosted discoverability by 327% across all languages.
Where Localization Breaks Down
Let’s say a retailer does the research, aligns the SEO and localizes the copy for the target market. To a casual visitor, the website looks fine. It still doesn’t convert. Why?
Conversion-ready language has to be accurate, culturally aligned, and designed to remove friction from product discovery all the way through checkout. Localization breakdowns most often happen at four specific points in that journey.
CTAs and site layout. Text length varies dramatically by language, and that has real consequences for how a page functions. When HubSpot spoke at our International Marketing Summit, they described exactly this problem: translating landing pages into German pushed CTA language below the fold because of longer compound words. The primary conversion point disappeared for German visitors. A page that worked perfectly in English was quietly broken in German.
Payment methods. Consumer expectations around payments vary dramatically by market. Afterpay is standard in Australia; in Brazil, customers still top up physical cards at stores; in China, WeChat Pay is effectively a prerequisite for online shopping. Launching in a new market with the wrong payment stack isn’t a friction problem, it’s a sales killer. Canva flagged this directly when they presented at the same summit.
Images. Images that resonate with a home-market audience can fall flat or backfire in a new one. A well-known example: Samsung pulled an ad in Singapore that celebrated a Muslim family with a son who was a drag queen. What was intended as an inclusive message misread the local cultural context, and instead of deepening the brand connection, the ad itself became the story. Not every image from the home market is safe to carry over without review.
Brand voice. Copy that is too safe can also backfire, particularly for a brand entering a market where it has no existing recognition. A useful counterexample comes from outside retail: the Unibet Rose Rockets pro cycling team, formed in 2019 from a trio of YouTube cycling creators, built an audience through irreverence and has kept that energy in every market they’ve moved into. Their website leads with a giant cartoon rocket, vibrant color combinations, bold typography and copy that doesn’t hedge. In a sport whose default setting is conservative, that distinctiveness has been the point. Not every brand should copy the approach, but the principle holds: playing it too safe in an unfamiliar market means you’ll be invisible.
Low Barriers, High Stakes
As AI continues to lower the cost of going international, more American SME retailers will launch internationally in the next two years than in the previous ten combined. The risk that comes with that acceleration is that many of them will treat AI localization as a complete solution, skipping the market research and cultural calibration that actually determines whether a site converts.
The brands that succeed will be the ones that treat their international sites as a trust signal. A visitor landing on your site in a new market has no prior relationship with your brand. The site itself has to do all the work of establishing credibility: messaging that reflects how that market thinks and speaks, payment methods people actually use, images that feel native rather than imported, and a tone that’s consistent with who you are while still landing locally.
Getting that right takes time and some real investment. But for retailers already seeing international traffic without having done any localization at all, the ceiling is high.
Eugène Ernoult is the Chief Marketing Officer at Weglot, an AI-powered website translation and localization platform that helps businesses grow internationally. He brings more than 15 years of marketing experience shaped by roles in business development and project management.
