19. Online Product Localization: Challenges and Solutions in Global Online Marketplaces

Intercultural interaction is riddled with challenges even during in-person encounters. When the physical playing field is removed, communication becomes all that more difficult, relying heavily on text and image. International ecommerce attempts to transcend this barrier, finding opportunity in online marketplaces. Without face-to-face interaction, localization efforts must be made in order to optimize the experience between virtual seller and buyer. With increased insight into the opportunity available for both buyer and seller in online marketplaces, the need to localize product feeds becomes apparent. As many international marketplaces exist today that facilitate the selling and buying of products across a multitude of verticals, studying how localization is currently implemented is useful to find areas of improvement based on theory that can be applied to a broad spectrum of product types and cultures. By detecting issues in looking at three of the largest, most successful online marketplaces, it can be inferred that there is a need for optimization on a larger scale. Determining best use of resources for these optimizations based on effort and impact is essential in answering the question of localization vs. standardization on a product level.