Internationalization and Reaching New Customers

Expanding OLAPLEX into 6 new countries and currencies prior to Shopify Markets

Problem

  • With OLAPLEX's expanding global reach, the website must accommodate diverse markets' language, culture, pricing, ingredients, and products. Warehouse expansion had already begun.
  • The current website lacks adaptability to meet individual country requirements and compliance standards effectively.
  • Pricing is displayed across the site in multiple ways adding to the challenge of having different prices, currencies, and tax styles depending on the country.
  • Note: Shopify Markets were not available during this period. (Post-launch of Markets, adjustments were made to stay current.)

Solution

  • In partnership with a language translator company, geo-location tooling, metafield apps, Shopify itself, and compliance we were able to plan and orchestrate a multi-phase, 50-ticket launch.
  • This initiative enhanced the existing site's flexibility to accommodate inputs from multiple countries, implement a new pricing system, creating new URL structures, recognize visitor locations, tailor purchases and catalogs, and adapt checkout and compliance processes to each country.
  • Our expansion began with the UK and Australia, subsequently extending to France, Spain, Italy, and English/French Canada.
  • Prioritizing functionality, our designs were made to gate & architect content specific to a country.
  • We also developed intuitive UIs for internal e-commerce managers, enabling effortless updates of country-specific content, pricing, and other site-wide modifications.

What to do with a multilingual country? Hello, Canada!

From the project's inception, we encountered numerous challenges in transitioning a website designed for one country into a platform that caters to multiple countries under a unified UI. This entailed customization of images, languages, content blocks, ingredients (at times), catalogs, pricing, taxation, addresses, and more for each country. After devising a clear strategy for English-speaking and non-English-speaking countries, we faced the unique task of creating both French and English websites for the Canadian audience without duplicating efforts excessively.

Specific complexities included ensuring seamless language swaps, accommodating content differences in French translation, and consistently applying the visitor's selected language across all pages. To solve this, we had to create a very specific URL strategy that held through across pages and user preferences. Through collaboration with the e-commerce product team, as well as our internal design and development teams, we successfully launched to major consumer and professional Canadian audiences while making significant progress on the professional site for France. Here are our some of our results:

40
Development Tasks
1st
Multi-lingual Launch
14k
New CA Visitors, 1st Month
60%
Singular Update Efforts for Both Language Settings

Canada Home Page in French and English

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