With the way technology has hastened globalization, it’s less easy to qualify languages other than English as “foreign.” It’s easy for us in English-speaking parts of the world to forget that English is not the dominant language – it’s actually the third most popular language spoken globally, behind Mandarin and Spanish.

We work with eCommerce companies in a lot of different countries. We also see many of our existing customers are selling beyond the borders of their native country and often creating websites tailored to the markets they’re selling to. That means we’re working with more and more languages and need to make sure our site search and navigation features work just as well in every language. To do that, we’ve licensed technology to enable us to index all the major languages and we’ve integrated that into our platform.

For example we recently integrated our site search onto HealthPost’s Japanese site, which contains a mixture of English and Japanese. Japanese has to be one of the hardest languages in the world for text processing. Like Chinese, there are no spaces, so you need to break a continuous stream of characters into words. Also, Japanese uses many different character sets – kanji (Chinese characters), Hiragana, Katakana, and Latin characters. Some people write and search using Kanji, while others use one of the two phonetic scripts.

A search on HealthPost’s Japanese site in either language will return results. Though the Japanese language is written in a very different series of characters than an English-language alphabet, users will still see the same learning-based results. Our learning algorithms operate on top of the index, improving the relevance based on how people interact with the results, generating related searches in either language and automatically creating pages optimized for popular keywords with good results.

Our analytics engine has been designed with different character sets in mind – so the reports will show popular searches, searches with poor results, facet labels, etc. correctly, regardless of the language used. In addition the console has been designed so we can easily add instructions and help in different languages, so non-English speakers can use it easily. As businesses all over the world move squarely into online commerce, we see the continued importance of offering a set of tools that can be used across languages. For the business tracking the most popular site search terms in a different language or for the customer searching for a product in their native language, a tailored experience is becoming the new norm.

With the indexing, learning and back-end console all working in multiple languages we can build you a relevant search that follows the industry best practices regardless of the languages. There are enough challenges building multi-lingual sites, without the need to worry about the complexities of site search.

As eCommerce becomes truly global, it’s absolutely necessary to cater to all clients, and making products easier to find and searchable in local native languages is one of the most important steps to do that.

Many of you were probably at IRCE a few weeks ago, but even if you weren’t – we want to share with you some of the insights we gained from the industry’s biggest, and perhaps most important, event. While there wasn’t much focus on completely new trends, the trends that we’ve been talking about for a while – mainly mobile, social, and a blending of the two to enhance the in-store and online experience – were front and center.

For example, this year mobile was talked about in terms of sales and commerce, whereas last year it was mainly addressed in terms of content. While customers still primarily research products on mobile devices (even when they’re in a physical store), they’re also making more purchases. And retailers are taking that into account as they continue to evolve their mobile presence, using the mobile platform to help people in a brick & mortar store.

Social media also plays a key role in the mobile and online shopping experience. A lot of brands are still figuring out how to utilize Facebook, Twitter, and others to foster deeper engagement, but they’re weaving social media content into mobile and traditional e-commerce sites more, and giving customers more incentive to ‘like’ their Facebook pages (or “pin” products to their Pinterest board) to increase sales.

Another topic discussed a lot was how big and small brands alike can compete with, and do things better, than the more established brands. Keynotes given by the CEOs of Barnes and Noble, William Lynch, and Walmart, Michael Duke, were quite interesting in terms of how they’ve had to find new approaches to selling online in order to beat the competition or just survive. For example, Barnes and Nobel had to completely change their business to adapt to a new environment driven largely by Amazon – which led to their huge and successful bet on the Nook. Part of Lynch’s strategy is to leverage the Barnes and Noble stores to get the Nook into people’s hands, which is an advantage they have over Amazon.

Walmart has also worked hard to blend the in-store shopping experience with online. For example, they offer in-store pick-ups for orders placed online, and also allow people to purchase an item ordered online with cash in the store. This is an appealing approach for people who don’t have credit cards or don’t feel secure using them online. Walmart is also using “geo-fencing” on their mobile app, using the phone’s GPS to find out which store a customer is in and show them store-specific information. And if a particular product isn’t available in the store it can be ordered using the mobile app. Duke also discussed some of the interesting things they’ve done with search, and how that’s helped their online business. For example, to better compete against Amazon, Walmart allows users to refine their product searches per department (Electronics, Music, Movies, Books) or for the entire store. They also implemented a cool “Find in Store” feature on the products pages to see if the particular products a user is looking at is carried at the local Walmart store.

Another interesting keynote was given by Sam Yagan, CEO of OKCupid, one of the largest dating sites. He talked about how companies are starting to use the unique data that his site collects to better understand their different market segments. This points to the ever-increasing dependence on customer data for success in online retail.

One of the more innovative vendors we saw at the show was a company called Eyeona, which has an app that guarantees the price won’t be lowered on a product someone just bought. If the retailer drops the price, then the user gets a voucher to spend the difference in store. Their business model is to sell this as a service to retailers as a way to drive people back to their site. For example, retailers can deliberately drop the price on products that were recently purchased, and give people an incentive to come back into the store where they’ll typically make a purchase significantly larger than the voucher that they have.

Overall, the common theme we saw was in how brick and mortar retailers are leveraging both their stores and the mobile platform to drive their online strategy. For pure-play online retailers, a focus on delivering a unique user experience is key to their success. And regardless of whether it’s shopping online or offline, innovation continues to happen throughout the whole industry.

The process of prepping your online storefront for holiday shoppers begins earlier every year – but there’s still time for last-minute “quick hits” that can help boost conversions and encourage shoppers to browse (and shop) longer on your site. Along with FitForCommerce, we’re presenting several of these quick-hit ideas in a free webinar on Wednesday, November 16 – read on for a sneak peek:

#1: Optimize holiday search terms: Review your shoppers’ most popular search terms from last year, and make sure you’ve matched these terms to the best products. Also, optimize searches that include general holiday-related keywords (like “gift” or “dad present”) to make sure results are relevant.

#2: Use site search as “your ears to the floor”: Site search gives you a real-time picture of what your customers want from your site. Review site search keywords and adjust landing pages and home pages as needed.

#3: Merchandise search and landing pages: Don’t miss out on opportunities to highlight products and special offers when visitors come to search results or landing pages. Create a gift finder that can help shoppers find gifts based on recipient and price, or add a special holiday product category that’s powered by search.

#4: Add holiday messages to navigation and search: Allow shoppers to reorder search results based on holiday-related categories like “top holiday picks” or “best-selling gifts.” Also, promote special holiday deals using banners or other messages within search – such as deals on shipping or free gift-wrapping.

#5: Incorporate mobile and social into the holiday shopping experience: More and more shoppers expect to do some of their holiday gift-buying from their mobile devices, and they want to research products via their social networks. Add social content into search results, and make mobile search and navigation as user-friendly as possible.

Looking for more ideas as you ramp up for holiday shoppers? Register for the November 16 webinar.