Shopify VS Bigcommerce VS Volusion – Localization Functionalities

Shopify:

Shopify allows creating multilingual stores in various ways. It supports creating multiple storefronts in different languages for different regions. For each store, you will have to create and provide complete content in that language and managed separately, which you might not be easy for every business owner. If you need to change something in your store, you will have to do it separately for each store. The second way is to use apps, if you don’t want to get into coding.

For many the need can be just of bilingual store. Shopifyninjas created the first and single bilingual Shopify theme to create Shopify ecommerce website in two languages. Langify, Shopify app, also allows you to translate your shop in many other languages.

Bigcommerce:

Though Bigcommerce comes with lot of good feature sets, but many hit them for these key things, but greater and often talked about lack of built-in language support. In today’s global economy, it would not be a wise choice for Bigcommerce to ignore multilingual support. It limits many businesses to grab the huge local markets. The single solution left behind is to use Google Translate, which will require custom coding and will need to be maintained each time Bigcommerce gets updated.

Volusion:

We contacted the support and found that Volusion does not support multilingual sites till now. If you plan to expand your business to the local markets in future, you might find it frustrating as it limits here. You will have to shift it to some other platform, if you can’t compromise on multilingual functionality in future.

When the business is global, it requires talking to their global customers personally. Just like language, the currency should also be localized to display the product prices to the customers in their home currency. By seeing the local currency, their comfort level is high and it saves them from the pain of going through mathematical exercise.

The websites with multi currency functionality automatically detect the location of the user through IP and find out his country from where he is accessing the site and then display the prices in local currencies on the store.

Though there are both ways to show local currencies, i.e. automated and manual, but using automated way is preferred as it saves you from having to manual provide exchange rates of different currencies. But, getting live rates is always just a click away.

Shopify

Shopify has few awesome apps to create a personalized shopping experience to the buyers. By detecting geographic location, the page lands with the local currency pricings. These apps are automated solutions and fetch live prices twice a day from XE.com, which is the most reliable source for currency exchange rates.

Bigcommerce

There is a lot of good in Bigcommerce regarding localization of currency. It comes with default capability to enable multi currency on your online store.

You can set up both manual and automatically updating exchanges rates, but the quickly movements in the prices suggests using automated method powered by XE.com. Once set up, your site will automatically display right currency to the shoppers coming to your site.

Besides this default capability, you can use a free app too to change the currencies based on the location.

Volusion

Volusion also do offer multi currency display for its stores, but the frustrating is that it is all manual. They tell on their website that “there is no automated way for the system to update the exchange rates for different currencies. Currency rates must be updated manually.”