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MONTREAL - E-commerce still isn’t widely used by Canada’s private sector businesses to sell products, even though online sales increased at a double-digit pace for the sixth consecutive year in 2007.

Statistics Canada reported Thursday that total private and public sector Internet sales hit an estimated $62.7 billion, up 26 per cent from 2006.

Men biggest buyers; One in three Quebecers shopping on Internet

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Online stores need to do a better job of understanding their audiences and provide a pleasant shopping experience, a study of Quebecer’s Internet shopping habits concluded.

The study’s findings surprised technology transfer group Cefrio, which commissioned the survey, about who shops online and for what.

For instance, the most purchased category of goods online are clothes, accessories and jewellery, comprising 13 per cent of online purchases since October 2007.

And women are the top buyers of such items, outnumbering men four to one. But many shopping sites aren’t geared to a feminine audience, researchers said.

“A lot of online stores are simply catalogs with an order form,” said Philippe Le Roux, an associate at Interactive marketing firm VDL2.

“Everyone complains that big-box hardware stores have almost no service. Well, most online stores are like these big-box stores,” Le Roux added.

Men are more likely to buy music, gadgets and computer equipment online. Travel products and games are evenly split among genders.

However, men are the biggest Internet buyers overall, accounting for roughly 55 per cent of shoppers.

The survey, conducted by polling firm SOM, has measured the shopping attitudes of 1,000 Quebecers every month since June 2007.

Its latest findings show that one in three Quebecers shop online. They spent on average $268 in February, a sharp drop from the $433 spent in December as the holidays approached.

The study urges Quebec businesses to start learning how to sell their wares online, because it takes two to three years to master e-commerce.

Axagen is pleased to bring you this article, which discusses the importance of accurate web translation for different markets as well as for optimizing your ranking on search engines

Sites must also reflect cultural preferences

Thursday, April 10, 2008

The Canadian Tourism Commission knew exactly how to optimize its website to foreign markets. It knew that Germans prefer canoe trips, while the Japanese are fond of organized bus tours. The multilingual version of its website reflects these preferences.

“It all comes down to understanding your clients,” said Huiping Iler, chief executive of WINTranslation.com, a Web translation service in Ottawa.

But there are few examples like this one, she says. Most companies don’t bother to understand their audiences when they translate websites. Sloppily made multilingual sites either turn off international clients with bad translations or don’t show up at all in Web searches.

Take the concept of an open house for a home for sale. This is a practice unknown in many countries, yet companies nonetheless push the service on their foreign language sites, even translating the words “open house” literally.

This is not only a linguistic and cultural blunder, but it also keeps search engines from pointing to a website.

“There’s a real lack of understanding,” Iler said. “People who do marketing are often unilingual. When they have to make content for another market, they may not know a lot about search engine marketing.”

Iler said companies too often ignore the combined power of search engines and good translation. In a marketing era when Google is a measure of reputation and people rarely search past the first page of a search result, making a website visible to foreign markets is crucial.

This means knowing the keywords that people use to find information in different countries.

For instance, a company that sells laptops needs to know whether people in a given country search for “notebook computers” or “portable computers” and put those words prominently on a Web page.

But this can be problematic, said Sylvain Amoros, the head strategist for Magnet Search Marketing, a division of Cossette Communications. Certain industries, like seniors’ residences, demand a semantic sensitivity in their marketing.

“You can’t put words like ‘old people’ or even ’seniors’ in the content. So you have to find ways around that,” he said.

But even proper translations sometimes aren’t enough to keep foreign eyeballs coming in, said Duncan Moore, an online marketer who recently joined Cossette. Sites have to keep updating the content to reflect changing attitudes.

“If you’re a company that sells sports jerseys, you have to keep up with new teams or new events that come up,” he said. “Once you translate a site, it doesn’t mean the work is done.”

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008