Shopware Translation? Why Clonable is perfect for translating your Shopware online store

Shopware is a popular e-commerce platform and is gaining an increasingly larger market share not only in Germany but also in many other countries, as an alternative to Magento. The CMS offers businesses a flexible and scalable solution for their online stores. One of the best features of Shopware is the ability to create multiple sales channels, allowing you to set up international stores from the same database. This allows e-commerce companies to reach a broader audience by making it easier to translate their online store into multiple languages. However, this system works even better when combined with Clonable . Why exactly? We’ll explain that here.

Sales channels and translation within Shopware: the “old-fashioned” way

Using Shopware sales channels for translations offers many advantages. First, it makes it easier for companies to reach international markets. By creating a sales channel for each language, companies can easily make their products and services available to a broader international audience. This can increase sales and raise awareness among new potential customers. And those customers will be more likely to purchase products if the online store is translated for them.

But how do you organize the translations? Typically, Shopware online retailers have to organize the translation themselves and then integrate it into their respective stores. This is a massive undertaking. And the costs add up significantly. Consider, for example, the cost of the project manager who takes on the “translate the international Shopware website” project within the team, the cost of the external translator (often paid per word), the cost of the content manager who inserts the translated texts, and so on. And this translation process must continue on an ongoing basis as new products are added to the product range, certain texts change, and so on—so the costs don’t simply stop once the initial large batch of translations has been implemented. In addition, you must also take into account that the initial setup for a new language takes a lot of time, and in the meantime, your new international store isn’t generating any revenue.

Sales channels and Clonable: staying flexible with machine translation

If the Shopware store owner wants to use Clonable to set up his Shopware website in another language, the process begins as usual.

1. The website builder creates a new sales channel where the basic configuration is set up, such as language, currency used, Google Analytics code, etc. This takes several hours.

2. Then this store is put live, but set to 'no-index' so that the store is not visible to search engines. At Clonable we call this Sales channel a 'ghost channel' or 'ghost store'. The url of this store then becomes, for example, ghost-store-de.yourshopwarestore.com.

3. At Clonable we get to work cloning 'ghoststore-de.yourshopwarestore.com' to a domain or subdomain. Which one is used is up to the client. For example, de.yourshopwarestore.com or de-shopwarestore.com.

4. All new changes or additions to the text are then automatically translated. This provides flexibility for the online store, so they no longer have to worry about translations but can still make adjustments to pages, menus, blog posts, SEO, payment methods, and more.

5. It is advisable to have a proofreader go through the Web store to check for translation errors. However, it is up to the owner to decide how many hours and how much money to spend on this.

In terms of costs, this saves a lot of money on the initial translations and the monthly translations needed to keep the web shop up to date. As a merchant you remain flexible because

• You can still easily adapt your design to the foreign version.

• You can still exclude certain products, change prices, etc. for the foreign market.

• If you want to create additional pages for the foreign market, you can easily do so without affecting the original language of the web shop.