A multilingual online store, built for search

Your main language keeps its addresses forever: /olive-wood-board stays /olive-wood-board on the day you add a second language. Portuguese is added beside it as /pt/olive-wood-board, French as /fr/olive-wood-board, each one its own page for a search engine, with hreflang links between them and every version in the sitemap.

We chose the path over a cookie on purpose. A cookie serves several languages from one address, so a crawler indexes whichever it happened to see and the rest of your translation is invisible. A path costs nothing and rides on the domain you already have.

• 22 languages for shoppers, including Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese as two separate languages, both Chinese scripts, and Arabic laid out right to left.
• The shop's own words, such as the basket, checkout and account wording, come translated by us in every one of them.
• A language can be added unpublished and published when its translation is ready. Shoppers reach only the published ones, through a language switcher.

Everything a shopper reads that you wrote: product titles and descriptions, options and their choices, attributes, category text, page titles, the text in every section, menu labels and the shop's tagline. Prices, stock, images and web addresses stay the same in every language.

A translation sits over the original rather than copying it, so a missing translation simply shows the original text, which is what a half-translated shop needs. Each translation also remembers the text it was written against. Edit the English description and the editor tells you the Portuguese one is now out of date, instead of the Portuguese page quietly selling last season's copy.

1. 1

   In the dashboard

   Each language has a screen listing what is translated and what is not, with the original beside each field.

2. 2

   In a spreadsheet

   Download a file with your text in one column and space for the translation in the next. Fill it in anywhere, or send it to a translator, and upload it back.

3. 3

   With Claude

   Ask the assistant to translate what is missing. It shows you the translations as a preview, and nothing reaches shoppers until you confirm.

Choose which of 15 currencies shoppers can read prices in: euro, pound, US, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand dollars, Swiss franc, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish crowns, złoty, koruna, yen, Singapore and Hong Kong dollars. Rates are the European Central Bank's daily reference rates, refreshed once a working day, and the dashboard warns you if they go stale.

Converted prices can be shown exact, rounded up to a whole number, or rounded up to .99, always up, so you never sell below the price you set. The charge itself is taken in your shop's currency, so refunds, reports and your plan usage need no converting. Each order records which currency the shopper was reading and the rate that applied, so a question six weeks later has an answer.

The dashboard you work in is in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and French, chosen separately from the languages your shop sells in. Selling from Portugal is covered in more detail on ecommerce in Portugal, and the payment side on payments.