As the leading luxury homeware and accessory retailer in the UK, Amara houses over 200 of the world’s most luxurious home fashion brands and is the exclusive online distributor of many collections, including Roberto Cavalli and Ralph Lauren Home. Founded in 2005, Amara’s successes are thanks in no small part to their award-winning customer service and robust international shipping, with 90% of stock available for overseas delivery.
This year, Head of International Expansion and resident SEO Expert Freddie Chatt worked with his internal team to create their very first localized version of Amara’s website. While Amara had traditionally served customers in France, up until recently, French shoppers weren’t able to browse the catalog and purchase in their native language.
After a year of planning, the team launched a brand new French website in October 2014 and saw explosive growth, with a 20% increase in conversion rates from France and a whopping 650% increase in revenue since last year.
Massive inventory, endless SKUs
Like many ecommerce companies, Amara manages a massive online catalog that calls for ongoing translation and maintenance. Today, Amara has tens of thousands of products featured on their website—in 2014 alone, the team doubled their inventory from 15,000 to 30,000 listings. When the French localization project kicked off, the team needed a simple way to translate this constant stream of content.
Without prior localization experience, Freddie combined research with some instincts from his SEO background to create a plan. “We investigated our options extensively before deciding on using Gengo for our translation needs. Coming from an SEO perspective, we instantly dismissed machine translation for two main reasons: it’s bad for search and gives an extremely poor user experience due to low quality.” The team also looked into working with individual freelance translators, but found it too expensive and slow for their needs.
Seeking scalability
After a few searches on Google, Freddie came across Gengo, opting to go with the platform due to its combination of high quality, affordable pricing and, importantly, scalable API integration. After working with Gengo’s Integrations team to integrate the API in time for launch, they were stunned at how fast it was.
“When we placed that first test API order, it came back in seconds. It was such a great feeling after the integration time to see how easy the process of getting the site translated has become,” Freddie recalls.
“Explosive growth into the French market”
After the website was localized into French, Freddie saw immediate year-over-year results in that market. Only 45 days post-launch, Amara has enjoyed the following growth in comparison to the year prior:
+700% traffic from France
+500% SEO traffic from France
+20% conversion rate
+650% revenue from France
Now shipping to over 200 countries around the world, Amara continues to work with Gengo to give customers a great experience in their native languages.
“Communication with the Gengo team was great throughout the entire process, ensuring that our integration was seamless and launched without delay. We experience the same efficiency and speed whenever we make tweaks to further improve performance,” Freddie commented. “Gengo’s quality is always on-point.”
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