The Realities of Selling WordPress Products Internationally

00:00:02 [Katie Keith]
One thing I love about selling software online is that your business is automatically international.
00:00:08 [Katie Keith]
You don't have to worry about shipping, customs tariffs, or any of the things that affect physical products and make them so complex.
00:00:16 [Katie Keith]
However, there are still some important things that you need to know about selling internationally.
00:00:21 [Katie Keith]
Let's talk about them now.

00:00:27 [Matt Cromwell]
This is WP Product Talk, a place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more.
00:00:39 [Matt Cromwell]
It's your go to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress product owners.
00:00:45 [Matt Cromwell]
And now enjoy the show.

00:00:53 [Katie Keith]
Hi.
00:00:53 [Katie Keith]
I'm Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Bantu.

00:00:57 [Zack Katz]
And I'm Zach Katz, founder and CEO of GravityKit.

00:01:00 [Katie Keith]
And today, we're talking about selling products internationally.

00:01:04 [Zack Katz]
And that's why we have invited Steve Jones today.
00:01:08 [Zack Katz]
Steve, welcome to the show.
00:01:09 [Zack Katz]
Thanks for joining us.
00:01:11 [Zack Katz]
Please introduce yourself.

00:01:13 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:01:13 [Steve Jones]
Well, thanks for having me, guys.
00:01:15 [Steve Jones]
My name is Steve Jones.
00:01:16 [Steve Jones]
I'm the cofounder and CTO of Equalize Digital.
00:01:20 [Steve Jones]
We specialize in accessibility software, services and training, including the accessibility checker plugin, which helps, ensure websites meet WCAG compliance.

00:01:34 [Steve Jones]
I've been building and selling WordPress products for well over a decade, and I've learned a lot about what it takes to serve, clients not just here in The US, but around the globe.

00:01:46 [Zack Katz]
Well, we're gonna be looking forward to learning more about your, your findings and sharing sharing our own.
00:01:55 [Zack Katz]
So, Steve, why is this an important topic for WordPress product owners?

00:02:01 [Steve Jones]
Well, I mean, it's, it's an important topic because, you know, you know, from our perspective, you know, our company specializes in accessibility.
00:02:10 [Steve Jones]
Right?
00:02:11 [Steve Jones]
And accessibility is all about being inclusive to everybody regardless of their abilities.
00:02:15 [Steve Jones]
Right?
00:02:16 [Steve Jones]
And if you wanna be inclusive in that regard, it's probably well fit to be inclusive in the regard of people that speak different languages or live in different reasons or live under jurisdictions that have different laws and requirements.

00:02:32 [Steve Jones]
And, I think it's just the right thing to do if you create great software and you create something that adds value to make it, accessible to as many people as possible.
00:02:41 [Steve Jones]
I think there's a business aspect to that as well too.
00:02:44 [Steve Jones]
Right?
00:02:44 [Steve Jones]
If you put in the time, the effort, the money, the investment into, creating software, you want to reach a large as big of an audience as you can to maximize your returns on that software so that you can keep moving it along, keep generating it, and keep making it better for all of your users.

00:03:07 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:03:08 [Katie Keith]
That's very true.
00:03:09 [Katie Keith]
And, yeah, it affects it's good for business, but, also, it's just the right thing to do, the legal thing to do in many cases.
00:03:17 [Katie Keith]
But there's a lot of different threads to it.
00:03:20 [Katie Keith]
So let's start by going into our show and tell section, where we talk about some of our work that we've each done to do with internationalizing our business.

00:03:31 [Katie Keith]
Do you want to go first, Steve?
00:03:32 [Katie Keith]
Because I know you've done some amazing work recently on the translation side of things.

00:03:37 [Steve Jones]
Sure.
00:03:37 [Steve Jones]
Sure.
00:03:37 [Steve Jones]
Totally.
00:03:38 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:03:39 [Steve Jones]
So we have recently, we we sponsored, WordCamp Europe, and we sent, Amber and Chris, our CEO and CTO, down there to, represent us.

00:03:52 [Steve Jones]
And and this was part of our our push to help support the European Accessibility Act.
00:03:57 [Steve Jones]
And at the same time, we kinda had some discussion back and forth internally with us owners about, you know, is the plug in ready for full translations?
00:04:07 [Steve Jones]
Is it should we translate it all now?
00:04:10 [Steve Jones]
There's recently been a lot of developments in AI translations.
00:04:15 [Steve Jones]
Are those is it ethical to use AI translations?

00:04:18 [Steve Jones]
Right?
00:04:19 [Steve Jones]
You have all these questions about it.
00:04:21 [Steve Jones]
So there's the technical aspect of it.
00:04:23 [Steve Jones]
It is kind of the ethical aspect of it.
00:04:25 [Steve Jones]
And, and we kinda came to the determination that, hey.

00:04:28 [Steve Jones]
Let's spend a couple days, like, seeing if we could implement this, and those couple days turned into three weeks.
00:04:35 [Steve Jones]
But because Accessibility Checker is a suite of plugins at this this point.
00:04:40 [Steve Jones]
It's five, separate plugins.
00:04:43 [Steve Jones]
And, there's a free plugin that actually is, distributed through wordpress.org, and then we have, a pro plugin and three add ons that are distributed ourselves, and we use EDD.
00:04:57 [Steve Jones]
And, there's different methods that you would take to translate, those different plugins in those different areas.

00:05:05 [Steve Jones]
So we we have, we have had a little bit of translation work and a little bit of contributor, contributions from from the Polyglot team to, translate, like, German.
00:05:19 [Steve Jones]
We had that, like, 9090% translated.
00:05:26 [Steve Jones]
And then a few other I have a screen.
00:05:29 [Steve Jones]
We could pull up my my screen here, and I can do the the show part of my show and tell.
00:05:33 [Steve Jones]
And I'll try to describe what I'm showing as we go along.

00:05:36 [Zack Katz]
Alright.
00:05:36 [Zack Katz]
Let's take a look.

00:05:38 [Steve Jones]
Okay.
00:05:39 [Steve Jones]
So so like I mentioned, when you when you distribute your your free plugin through wordpress.org, there there is, what's called GlotPress.
00:05:51 [Steve Jones]
I'm I'm showing the translate.wordpress.org, website for our accessibility checker plug in, and you can see, what's been translated.
00:06:03 [Steve Jones]
On the screen, I'm showing German at, like, 78%, translated and Dutch at 42% translated and Spanish at 14.
00:06:12 [Steve Jones]
And then it goes down a a few few languages.

00:06:16 [Steve Jones]
The interesting thing once you hit a certain threshold, it will actually initiate the translation on your wordpress.org play page.
00:06:25 [Steve Jones]
I'm looking at wordpress.org/plugins/accessibility-checker.
00:06:31 [Steve Jones]
So here you can see we have, five languages.
00:06:36 [Steve Jones]
And you can see that, like, once you hit a certain threshold, then it pops up here.
00:06:40 [Steve Jones]
So you're kinda reliant on, translation contributors, translating your strings for you.

00:06:49 [Zack Katz]
Which is volunteer labor that has its own, its own ethical implications.
00:06:55 [Zack Katz]
And Yeah.
00:06:57 [Zack Katz]
And and and we've had such trouble with this as well in the past where you just rely on people every eight months, they might have a spurt of translations.
00:07:07 [Zack Katz]
But then whenever as a developer, I add a translatable string, I feel bad because I know that somebody is going to have to translate this.
00:07:15 [Zack Katz]
And if it's more verbose than it needs to be or if it has some complex structure that has, like, placeholders that get replaced, the more complex the string, the worse I would feel about adding new strings.

00:07:27 [Zack Katz]
So I would leave old badly trans like, badly written labels with capitalization that was inconsistent because I didn't wanna burden the translator.
00:07:36 [Zack Katz]
Right.
00:07:37 [Zack Katz]
And that is absurd.
00:07:38 [Zack Katz]
So, that's what we've also switched to AI translations, and I feel no shame or guilt about adding wonderful, beautiful language to my plugins now.

00:07:50 [Katie Keith]
So do you have any evidences to the quality of AI translations?

00:07:54 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:07:55 [Steve Jones]
So so, I'll answer that, but let me speak to what Zach said.
00:08:00 [Steve Jones]
Yes.
00:08:00 [Steve Jones]
So our our our German was actually 90%, and then we actually made some changes with the way that our JavaScript compiles.
00:08:08 [Steve Jones]
We actually fixed, some of the translations that were actually being dropped in the compile phase, and it dropped us from 90% down to 78%.

00:08:17 [Steve Jones]
So there's now more strings in there.
00:08:19 [Steve Jones]
And and the and the translate the translation contributors, actually, I think, has reduced the team has even reduced since COVID.
00:08:29 [Steve Jones]
So it's it's very hard to get this translated into all the languages that you need.
00:08:34 [Steve Jones]
So so to your point, what you to your question, Katie, we decided to go with this PTC.
00:08:43 [Steve Jones]
This was a recommendation that, our CEO, Amber Hines, got, and she sent it over to me to take a look and to see if we can implement this.

00:08:52 [Steve Jones]
So, I'm on ptc.wpml.org.
00:08:57 [Steve Jones]
And their catchphrase says here AI powered translation software.
00:09:02 [Steve Jones]
I think it's somewhere maybe they moved removed it.
00:09:04 [Steve Jones]
It says better than human translations every time.
00:09:07 [Steve Jones]
Right?

00:09:08 [Steve Jones]
So it's like, I can't fully validate whether or not these are actually better than human, and I really don't know what that means.
00:09:15 [Steve Jones]
But, like, it's a good tagline.
00:09:18 [Steve Jones]
So what we did was we we kinda did a test.
00:09:21 [Steve Jones]
We we rolled this up a little bit, and we ran our our our our pot file, which is the file that holds all your translation strings through here.
00:09:30 [Steve Jones]
And then we kinda put together a a build for Amber while she was in Europe.

00:09:36 [Steve Jones]
She grabbed a few people and said, hey.
00:09:38 [Steve Jones]
You know, you speak Dutch.
00:09:39 [Steve Jones]
You know, you speak German.
00:09:40 [Steve Jones]
Can you can you validate this?
00:09:43 [Steve Jones]
How does this look?

00:09:44 [Steve Jones]
And and and the feedback that she got was it it looks pretty good.
00:09:49 [Steve Jones]
Sure, there may be a few things here and there that can change, But the feedback was good.

00:09:57 [Zack Katz]
We are a past guest, Jack Arturo, ran a tool that, like, my team created called Podomatic, and I'll be talking about this, after after this.
00:10:08 [Zack Katz]
And their feedback was they had a a German, customer review it in-depth, and there was one issue that was some, a a word that should have been added to a dictionary, which you can do.
00:10:20 [Zack Katz]
You can define a dictionary term that should like, let it know that this means this.
00:10:25 [Zack Katz]
So when you say slug, you don't mean the slimy creature that crawls over your garden.
00:10:29 [Zack Katz]
You mean, the URL endpoint.

00:10:33 [Zack Katz]
So you can add dictionary terms like that and improve and refine.
00:10:36 [Zack Katz]
So when people who use your software say, hey.
00:10:40 [Zack Katz]
This string is improperly translated, you can fix that and will be fixed forever as you go forward.
00:10:45 [Zack Katz]
So, it learns as AI is wanting to do, what you know, how to better translate your software as you go.

00:10:53 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:10:54 [Steve Jones]
Totally.
00:10:54 [Steve Jones]
And we we even got feedback, like, the word, like, get accessibility checker, like, it I think that's what it was.
00:11:00 [Steve Jones]
Like, and and, like, maybe and Dutch, it, like, means get it for free.
00:11:05 [Steve Jones]
You know?

00:11:06 [Steve Jones]
And that's not exactly what we're saying.
00:11:09 [Steve Jones]
But, so I can walk you through a little bit too about that.
00:11:13 [Steve Jones]
So the way that this ptc.wpml.org works is you actually set it to watch, a GitHub branch.
00:11:23 [Steve Jones]
So we set it to watch our develop branch.
00:11:25 [Steve Jones]
And, anytime that we push up a pop file with with change strings inside of it, it will actually auto generate, all the, MO and PO files, which are your translation files, and and up to 32 different languages.

00:11:44 [Steve Jones]
And and the interesting thing about it too is that in the in the dashboard for this this application, you actually you actually can edit this and and and manage it just like you would on polyglot on wordpress.org, where, I'm showing the admin, and you can see the all of my strings in English, and then you can see a column, like, almost like a spreadsheet, where you can edit the languages in every language.
00:12:13 [Steve Jones]
So if there is a translation that somebody comes back to us and says, hey.
00:12:16 [Steve Jones]
This says, get accessibility checker, but it's pro and you're gonna charge me.
00:12:21 [Steve Jones]
But in my language, get means you're, like, giving it to me for free.
00:12:25 [Steve Jones]
We could actually go in here for that particular language, and we can edit it to a phrase that they provide to us and and have confirmed that this is a better string to use.

00:12:37 [Steve Jones]
And any and it'll actually override that with what's with what's in our pot file.
00:12:43 [Steve Jones]
So if we push up a new pot file with that same string, it'll actually pull from from what we've edited here.

00:12:50 [Zack Katz]
And from a development standpoint, you can also just FYI for those listening who don't know this, when you translate a string in WordPress, you can also provide context.
00:13:00 [Zack Katz]
So when you say get accessibility checker, you can also add a context string to it that says, when I say get, I mean purchase.
00:13:08 [Zack Katz]
Yeah.
00:13:08 [Zack Katz]
And then that can be that will be read by and processed by PTC and Podomatic and other automated translations.
00:13:15 [Zack Katz]
And also for the translators that don't know that get accessibility checker means purchase.

00:13:21 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:13:21 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:13:22 [Steve Jones]
So so this was kind of a great tool for that.
00:13:25 [Steve Jones]
And we even ran into too where we we in our plugin, you wanna be making sure that your plugin or your theme that you're selling is translatable.
00:13:35 [Steve Jones]
I kinda skipped over that a little bit, but making sure you're using translation functions that wrap your strings.

00:13:42 [Steve Jones]
And when we went through that process of we've been doing that over many years, making sure that's why this process was a little easy because most of our strings were already translatable.
00:13:55 [Steve Jones]
And, and we were we're able to ensure that through our own linting and our own CI processes.
00:14:01 [Steve Jones]
And quite frankly, if you use an a lot AI, code reviews such as Code Rabbit, or, you know, Gemini code reviews, those will a lot of times will catch untranslated strings as well.
00:14:15 [Steve Jones]
We kinda translated too many strings.
00:14:19 [Steve Jones]
So, we translated our own product names.

00:14:23 [Steve Jones]
And, the nice thing about PTC is that, you it has a glossary where you can actually put in, you know, like, for, like, accessibility checker.
00:14:35 [Steve Jones]
We don't wanna translate that.
00:14:36 [Steve Jones]
So in all languages, it's gonna be accessibility checker.
00:14:40 [Steve Jones]
And we can just manage that from here.
00:14:41 [Steve Jones]
We don't have to untranslate the string inside of all the plugins.

00:14:46 [Steve Jones]
And with with every pull, we can know that those branded phrases are always gonna be branded.

00:14:52 [Zack Katz]
And for those, strings that shouldn't be translated as well, one thing that we found is you wanna add shortcodes to the glossary.
00:15:01 [Zack Katz]
If you have short codes, you do not want the short codes to be translated if they include Good point.
00:15:06 [Zack Katz]
Words.
00:15:06 [Zack Katz]
Yeah.

00:15:08 [Steve Jones]
It's a great point.
00:15:10 [Steve Jones]
So for us, as a as a development team, we we've learned that, if we don't automate it, we're gonna have a hard time following it and keeping up with it.
00:15:21 [Steve Jones]
So we had to build this into our our continuous integration to ensure that we keep up with it, that my developers keep up with it.
00:15:28 [Steve Jones]
And any new developers that come on the team or anybody that contributes to our our free plug in because it's a public repo that anybody can submit PRs to.
00:15:38 [Steve Jones]
We had to build this into our CI.

00:15:40 [Steve Jones]
And I'll just kind of run through this real quick because it gets highly technical.
00:15:47 [Steve Jones]
But, basically, what we've done is we created a a workflow inside of GitHub.
00:15:52 [Steve Jones]
I'm I'm looking at github.com right now, and I'm looking at the accessibility checker repo.
00:15:59 [Steve Jones]
And I've I've pulled up a, a GitHub workflow.
00:16:03 [Steve Jones]
It's it's my developer named it make pot.

00:16:06 [Steve Jones]
I think he's being funny here.
00:16:08 [Steve Jones]
But, this is a workflow that generates a pot file.
00:16:13 [Steve Jones]
So you can use the WordPress CLI in your command line to to generate a pot file from all of your translatable strings.
00:16:22 [Steve Jones]
Well, we don't wanna we don't wanna have to manually do that every time.
00:16:26 [Steve Jones]
So once you push up to a, to the develop branch, it's watching this workflow will run.

00:16:32 [Steve Jones]
It it essentially it essentially rolls up, WordPress install and runs the the proper WPC CLI commands to generate the the pot file and the JSON, the JSON file.
00:16:46 [Steve Jones]
So a dot m o or a dot p o file, which is generated by PTC for us off of the pot file, those are actually the files with the translatable strings in them.
00:16:59 [Steve Jones]
The the the dot p o is a human readable one and the dot m o is a machine file that's not human readable.
00:17:06 [Steve Jones]
And you could actually just distribute the, dot m o file.
00:17:10 [Steve Jones]
And then and those work for PHP.

00:17:13 [Steve Jones]
For JavaScript, you gotta u use, JSON files for your translation strings.
00:17:18 [Steve Jones]
So this will generate the the pot file.
00:17:21 [Steve Jones]
It goes to PTC.
00:17:22 [Steve Jones]
PTC PTC watches that branch.
00:17:26 [Steve Jones]
It creates the translations.

00:17:28 [Steve Jones]
It pushes those translations back to GitHub for us as a PR to that initial PR, and then we can just merge it in.
00:17:37 [Steve Jones]
And it'll actually generate the, JSON strings.
00:17:40 [Steve Jones]
We ran into some issues with PTC and JSON.
00:17:43 [Steve Jones]
We chose to to do the JSON the WordPress way, and I think that PTC does some sort of chunking of the JSON strings.
00:17:52 [Steve Jones]
And we were we weren't able to really get that to work for the way we have things set up.

00:17:57 [Steve Jones]
So we actually will generate those ourselves with the same the same workflow after we get the translations back.
00:18:06 [Steve Jones]
And so you can see the the first PR here.
00:18:09 [Steve Jones]
This is our workflow it runs.
00:18:12 [Steve Jones]
I'm looking at a a new PR here.
00:18:15 [Steve Jones]
It's called update update transition files.

00:18:18 [Steve Jones]
So if I up, like like Zach said, he updates a string.
00:18:21 [Steve Jones]
He doesn't have we don't have to have a heart attack because we we updated a a string.
00:18:28 [Steve Jones]
This will actually just identify it.
00:18:30 [Steve Jones]
It it it will update the pot file.
00:18:33 [Steve Jones]
PTC will see this.

00:18:34 [Steve Jones]
It'll it'll it'll now PTC, I've switched over to a new PR where PTC is opened, and you can see I have a 100 files in here because these these are all the translations files here.
00:18:46 [Steve Jones]
So we we have these.
00:18:47 [Steve Jones]
We've got all our translations.
00:18:49 [Steve Jones]
This is all done automatically, and it's gonna be done in CI.
00:18:53 [Steve Jones]
So no developer can actually bypass this, and, this ensures that strings are all translated moving forward.

00:19:01 [Zack Katz]
Nice.
00:19:02 [Zack Katz]
And we will make sure to add these URLs that you're showing to the show notes so that, people, if they're listening or watching and they wanna look more at the the YAML file for make pot, looks like, you can check out our show notes at wpproducttalk.com for this episode.

00:19:20 [Katie Keith]
Yep.
00:19:20 [Katie Keith]
Good plan.
00:19:21 [Katie Keith]
So that is translating the actual plugins.
00:19:24 [Katie Keith]
But what about translating the information that lead people to buy our plugins?
00:19:30 [Katie Keith]
So every time I go to a WordCamp, I meet somebody from either Weglot or TranslatePress, and they convince me that it's an amazing idea to translate our website.

00:19:42 [Katie Keith]
And I can never decide because I I live in Spain, and it is very easy as a user for me to right click or whatever and translate in the browser.
00:19:53 [Katie Keith]
It's not a barrier for me if the website is Spanish only and not translated into English.
00:19:59 [Katie Keith]
But what these translation plug in people are telling me is that it's a massive SEO opportunity because if people are typing, for example, in Spanish, they might be typing product table for WooCommerce in Spanish, and my plug in is called WooCommerce product table and not the translated version.
00:20:20 [Katie Keith]
So I'm not going to rank for a Spanish language search term, or at least not as well than if I actually translated my website into Spanish.
00:20:30 [Katie Keith]
And so apparently, we could improve our ranking significantly by translating our website.

00:20:36 [Katie Keith]
So I'm currently in the early stages of planning a project to trial that for maybe a couple of languages, not our whole site, but our product pages and the entire purchase flow, so the checkout and everything.
00:20:49 [Katie Keith]
And just to see and then we will measure, do we actually rank more highly?
00:20:54 [Katie Keith]
I'd love to know, do either of you translate your websites?
00:20:57 [Katie Keith]
Have you got any evidence that is it worth doing for either the user or for the SEO?

00:21:05 [Zack Katz]
So I was just reviewing a a product page for a friend in WordPress that they were putting together for a course, and they asked me what they thought or what I thought.
00:21:13 [Zack Katz]
And, it looked great.
00:21:15 [Zack Katz]
It was it looked like a really good, product.
00:21:18 [Zack Katz]
I was sold, and then I got down to the bottom, and it said €219.
00:21:24 [Zack Katz]
I was like, what the hell?

00:21:26 [Zack Katz]
I don't know what euros are.
00:21:28 [Zack Katz]
I know they're less than they used to be compared to the US dollar or that US dollar is worse.
00:21:32 [Zack Katz]
It's they're more than that's the it made me think.
00:21:37 [Zack Katz]
And the goal with websites is don't make me think.
00:21:40 [Zack Katz]
And so I don't I agree, Katie, that many international users have Google Translate built in their browser or, like, similar thing where, like, they come to a website and it's automatically translated.

00:21:50 [Zack Katz]
I don't think that we're losing sales other than the SEO opportunities because of translation.
00:21:54 [Zack Katz]
I do think that we are probably losing sales due to, not showing prices in their native, currency, but also not having international pricing.
00:22:05 [Zack Katz]
And I got, I want I I hope to that we can talk about this.
00:22:10 [Zack Katz]
I know we've talked about a little bit in the past on WP product talk, but, I had somebody reach out to me from India and say, listen.
00:22:18 [Zack Katz]
Your products are amazing, and, they're really expensive here in India.

00:22:23 [Zack Katz]
What can you do?
00:22:24 [Zack Katz]
And I'm a start up.
00:22:26 [Zack Katz]
I don't have many, you know, much funds.
00:22:28 [Zack Katz]
I want so I'd love to talk about international pricing as well as currency display.

00:22:35 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:22:35 [Katie Keith]
They're both relevant, and I do have experience of both of those.
00:22:39 [Katie Keith]
So we sell in seven currencies, based on the areas that the majority of our customers are.
00:22:46 [Katie Keith]
When we first introduced that, I didn't actually measure an increase in conversion rates, and I did check.
00:22:53 [Katie Keith]
But once you've done it, it's very hard to go back, so we've just kept it.

00:22:56 [Katie Keith]
But I don't have any numbers to say to you that's gonna improve your conversion rates.
00:23:02 [Katie Keith]
And we I've also tried custom country specific pricing specifically for India for the reason that you mentioned.
00:23:10 [Katie Keith]
We noticed in our analytics that a huge proportion of our visitors were from India, but a tiny proportion of our sales were, and that may well be because of the price barrier.
00:23:21 [Katie Keith]
So we did an experiment where because we were already using a multi currency plug in, we were able to set different prices per country quite easily.
00:23:32 [Katie Keith]
So we set a manual price that was much lower for India and saw how that went.

00:23:37 [Katie Keith]
And when we measured it over about six months, we found that we vastly increased the number of sales from India, but that was the exact same proportion as the price that we had dropped it.
00:23:49 [Katie Keith]
So if we if it was a third of the price, then we tripled it, if that makes sense.
00:23:54 [Katie Keith]
Then we tripled the number.
00:23:55 [Katie Keith]
Therefore, profit was the same.
00:23:58 [Katie Keith]
Anything you do that adds complexity has to have a clear benefit, so we no longer offer cheaper prices for any country.

00:24:06 [Katie Keith]
But we do set the currency pricing, based on some clever rules and things.
00:24:11 [Katie Keith]
It's not just an automatic translation.
00:24:14 [Katie Keith]
So there is that.

00:24:16 [Zack Katz]
What do you do, Steve?

00:24:18 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:24:19 [Steve Jones]
We don't.
00:24:19 [Steve Jones]
We don't.
00:24:20 [Steve Jones]
We just have standard, you know, like you said, we keep we try to keep things as simple as possible for a small team trying to make a big impact.
00:24:28 [Steve Jones]
So we don't do any, you know, multicurrency pricing in that regard.

00:24:34 [Steve Jones]
And and, back to the and the question about, like, translations, you know, on your website for your marketing pages, we don't currently do that either.
00:24:45 [Steve Jones]
You know, like you said, you can use you can your browser can translate those pages for people, but, you know, things can get lost in translation.
00:24:55 [Steve Jones]
It's interesting.
00:24:57 [Steve Jones]
It'd be an interesting experiment to to maybe pick a language.
00:25:01 [Steve Jones]
Like, we've had a lot of movement in in German for some reason.

00:25:06 [Steve Jones]
And, you know, maybe that would be a good experiment to try to translate that to pit that those marketing pages to see if there is any net SEO benefit.
00:25:17 [Steve Jones]
I can see that Amber said in the comments that Taco said that they did this at Yoast and that there was no trackable benefit to it.
00:25:27 [Steve Jones]
So it's definitely interesting.

00:25:30 [Zack Katz]
Yeah.
00:25:30 [Zack Katz]
Amber's comment is, I talked to Taco about this and he said they did this at Yoast and saw no benefit or tractable increase in sales.

00:25:37 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:25:37 [Steve Jones]
And

00:25:38 [Zack Katz]
if they did that

00:25:38 [Katie Keith]
And that's worrying, actually.
00:25:40 [Katie Keith]
They're still far bigger than us.
00:25:42 [Katie Keith]
They would have much better data.
00:25:44 [Katie Keith]
So that's very interesting.

00:25:46 [Zack Katz]
Well, and that's the thing I, you know, the I don't know if it's, a bias that the our sales numbers versus our visit numbers, show that our best sales are in, US, Canada, England, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, kind of in that order.

00:26:09 [Katie Keith]
Same.

00:26:10 [Zack Katz]
Yeah.
00:26:10 [Zack Katz]
And I I'm looking at Greater Asia, including India, and thinking there are, you know, billions of people using hundreds of millions of websites.
00:26:20 [Zack Katz]
Surely, there are customers there.
00:26:23 [Zack Katz]
And I've tried to target them in the past, and I'm using pay per click, specifically.
00:26:30 [Zack Katz]
And the the cost of acquiring a customer there is very high relative to the cost the the revenue that we get from it.

00:26:39 [Zack Katz]
And if we cut our costs or if we cut the pricing, the margin goes down.
00:26:44 [Zack Katz]
We're not able to provide the same level of support.
00:26:47 [Zack Katz]
I do wonder, though, if the answer for those areas might be an introduction to our services because I know that a lot of people are using GPL vault, like, other GPL site services where they pay of they pay much less and they get the software that's pirated or whatever.
00:27:07 [Zack Katz]
Instead of doing that, we could offer a no support download license where there's an expectation that, yes, you get the software.
00:27:15 [Zack Katz]
You can use our docs.

00:27:16 [Zack Katz]
You are not able to contact support without paying a higher amount.
00:27:19 [Zack Katz]
And that way, we protect our margins, and, they're able to, you know, get get access to our wonderful tools, without breaking their own bank.

00:27:30 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:27:30 [Steve Jones]
And we had a little bit when we were going through the discussion on the translations on whether we should kinda push forward with that.
00:27:38 [Steve Jones]
And we kind of we experienced the same thing.
00:27:40 [Steve Jones]
Right?
00:27:40 [Steve Jones]
We don't we don't do a lot in Asia, but we do a lot in Europe and The United States.

00:27:44 [Steve Jones]
And and, and, you know, my lead developer on the plug in, you know, he's from Europe, and and and he had a lot of feedback about this.
00:27:53 [Steve Jones]
And and the the thing about Europeans is we get the benefit and and and the reward of Europeans really knowing English as a second language and being a lot of times being taught it in, in in

00:28:08 [Zack Katz]
Or fifth.
00:28:09 [Zack Katz]
You know?

00:28:09 [Steve Jones]
Or fifth language.
00:28:10 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:28:11 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:28:11 [Steve Jones]
So it's like, you know, they're buying the product now because they can actually read the English translates the the English language.
00:28:21 [Steve Jones]
So it was kinda like, you know, do we really translate it to, you know, German and all these languages because they actually speak English too.

00:28:29 [Steve Jones]
And I don't know if if that's why we can we can sell so easily to to Europe without a lot of effort.
00:28:37 [Steve Jones]
And maybe that's the disconnect, you know, when you go over to Asia is that really they don't have English as a a second language.
00:28:45 [Steve Jones]
And I

00:28:45 [Katie Keith]
think the web developers pretty much all do though, don't they?
00:28:48 [Katie Keith]
The Indian web developers have amazing English.

00:28:51 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:28:52 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:28:52 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.

00:28:53 [Zack Katz]
Yeah.
00:28:53 [Zack Katz]
The language barrier in India isn't so much an issue.
00:28:56 [Zack Katz]
I they also speak English as a first or second language, I believe.
00:29:00 [Zack Katz]
And but it's, you know, the amount of funds that are available to purchase, and that, I think, is a vicious cycle as well.
00:29:11 [Zack Katz]
If they don't have access to tools where they can increase their their own sales, how can they pay for ours?

00:29:19 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:29:19 [Katie Keith]
Definitely an issue.
00:29:21 [Katie Keith]
So another thing that we haven't covered yet is the tax side of things, which is, I know, a big worry for a lot of people when they start selling WordPress products, particularly people that have maybe previously sold on a marketplace or something that did that for them.
00:29:37 [Katie Keith]
I know, a lot of people, for example, have previously sold on the Envato marketplaces and then suddenly don't anymore because of things that have happened over there.
00:29:46 [Katie Keith]
And they're like, what do I do with tax?

00:29:48 [Katie Keith]
I just know it's one of the bigger pain points.
00:29:51 [Katie Keith]
And the thing a lot of people don't realize, particularly Americans, is that if you sell digital products to customers in Europe, you actually have to sort out the European tax.
00:30:03 [Katie Keith]
It doesn't matter where your business is based.
00:30:06 [Katie Keith]
It's about where the customer is based, and all software, all theme and plug in companies sell to customers in Europe.
00:30:14 [Katie Keith]
So that means that you have to register for European tax and UK tax because that's no longer in the EU, and you have to let them enter a VAT number on the checkout and reverse charge that if they've got one.

00:30:28 [Katie Keith]
If not, then you charge them, say, the German VAT if they're in Germany and don't have a VAT number, and then you have to pay that over to the centralized European tax service.
00:30:39 [Katie Keith]
It's a nightmare.
00:30:41 [Katie Keith]
I do not agree with the law, but that is the law, and all plug in and theme companies should be actually meeting that.
00:30:49 [Katie Keith]
And I would say the easiest way to do that is to use something like Freemius or Paddle to sell your theme or plugins rather than doing it on your own website directly because they'll do it for you.
00:31:02 [Katie Keith]
That means that they're the merchant of record and not you, so they're responsible, but lots don't.

00:31:09 [Katie Keith]
We use Easy Digital Downloads, and it was such a problem that we've actually got a plug in for this EDD VAT, which loads of plug in companies use because it's, like, the only way.
00:31:21 [Katie Keith]
And EDD don't even make it possible.
00:31:24 [Katie Keith]
Same with WOO.
00:31:24 [Katie Keith]
If you're selling on WOO, you need to use a plug in to sort all this out, and it's not part of core.
00:31:31 [Katie Keith]
So, do either of you, do anything with European VAT?

00:31:34 [Katie Keith]
I know a lot of, plug in companies don't.

00:31:39 [Zack Katz]
I would be, hounded by Vova.
00:31:44 [Zack Katz]
Great.
00:31:44 [Zack Katz]
If I did not say, you know, Freemius is the probably easiest and best way to do this.
00:31:51 [Zack Katz]
Having a merchant record has so many benefits, but it also, in my mind, has some drawbacks where you don't necessarily own the customer relationship they do.
00:32:02 [Zack Katz]
Freemius, they have a, for those who are wondering, they have they they say that they are willing and able to transfer your customers out.

00:32:10 [Zack Katz]
So, like, if if you don't wanna stay with them, you can transfer it to your own Stripe account, which is good.
00:32:17 [Zack Katz]
The merchant of record has other benefits, including that they, they handle some refund customer support if you want them to in Paddle specifically.
00:32:27 [Zack Katz]
I've I've spoken with them about this where they can handle all refund requests, and you don't have to be involved at all, which is also scary to me as somebody who wants to control the customer experience.

00:32:40 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:32:40 [Katie Keith]
I wouldn't want that.
00:32:41 [Katie Keith]
We want

00:32:41 [Zack Katz]
to see that as

00:32:42 [Katie Keith]
you then.

00:32:43 [Zack Katz]
Right.
00:32:43 [Zack Katz]
But billing and and and pricing, you know, billing questions and refunds are a large portion of any plug in company's support load.
00:32:51 [Zack Katz]
So that would free up our support team to do you know, to spend more time on non billing issues.
00:32:57 [Zack Katz]
So there are some upsides and downsides.

00:33:00 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:33:00 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:33:00 [Steve Jones]
Totally.
00:33:01 [Steve Jones]
And, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but, like, the VAT, it the it's different for, you know, b to c and b to b.
00:33:09 [Steve Jones]
Right?

00:33:09 [Steve Jones]
Like, do you

00:33:12 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:33:12 [Katie Keith]
But you still need to do it.
00:33:14 [Katie Keith]
So b to b have to be able to prove they're a business by entering their VAT number.
00:33:19 [Katie Keith]
Right.
00:33:19 [Katie Keith]
And then that reverse charges the tax, and then you have to give them a certain type of invoice as evidence.

00:33:24 [Katie Keith]
So you have to comply either way even if your customers are businesses.
00:33:28 [Katie Keith]
It's really annoying.

00:33:30 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:33:30 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:33:30 [Steve Jones]
Well, I mean, I know in The United States there's, you know, there's actually certain states.
00:33:36 [Steve Jones]
It's on a state by state basis, have certain, tax regulations about charging tax on digital products.
00:33:44 [Steve Jones]
And, but in The United States, a lot of times, it it's there's a threshold.

00:33:48 [Steve Jones]
Right?
00:33:48 [Steve Jones]
There's it's either a 500 or a most states are, like, a 500,000 threshold and some some are, like, a $100,000 threshold.
00:33:56 [Steve Jones]
So there's definitely something on our side, for The United States that we're we definitely monitor those buckets a little bit to see if there's something at some point in time where we need to start charging that's that that tax for for, US customers.

00:34:12 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:34:13 [Katie Keith]
That's true.
00:34:13 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.

00:34:15 [Zack Katz]
I'd like to ask y'all what you do for handling support, in multiple languages.
00:34:21 [Zack Katz]
Like, what what setups do you have?
00:34:23 [Zack Katz]
How do you, how do you have your customer support team manage, people who are not natively English speakers?

00:34:32 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:34:33 [Steve Jones]
So for us, we we we don't have that support, and we, we I don't know that we've ever gotten a ticket in a language other than English.
00:34:44 [Steve Jones]
And, we typically our support is pretty straightforward.
00:34:48 [Steve Jones]
We have, you know, somebody that runs first tier support.
00:34:51 [Steve Jones]
And then if it's if it's an issue that can't be resolved there, then it gets escalated to the dev team, to one of our developers to to look at.

00:35:02 [Steve Jones]
So we haven't really run into that issue too much.
00:35:04 [Steve Jones]
We do have native Spanish speakers on our team, if if if somebody did contact us that speaks, Spanish.
00:35:13 [Steve Jones]
But we have we luckily have not run into it, so far.

00:35:19 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:35:20 [Katie Keith]
So we keep doing that.
00:35:21 [Katie Keith]
We're putting on the same comments at the same time.
00:35:24 [Katie Keith]
So Ian says have Google Translate in another tab.
00:35:28 [Katie Keith]
I was about to say the same thing.

00:35:30 [Katie Keith]
So we do receive occasional support tickets in other languages.
00:35:35 [Katie Keith]
We just Google Translate it.
00:35:37 [Katie Keith]
Our support is almost all email or live chat based, so it's really easy to use an automatic translator.
00:35:44 [Katie Keith]
And so we try to reply in the customer's language.
00:35:47 [Katie Keith]
It doesn't matter that we can't check it there.

00:35:49 [Katie Keith]
It's good enough.

00:35:51 [Zack Katz]
Yeah.
00:35:51 [Zack Katz]
I was thinking in advance of our talk today, that we could make some optimizations to our own support flow where, we could say in the description field for the what's going on, just use your own language.
00:36:04 [Zack Katz]
It's fine.
00:36:05 [Zack Katz]
You know?
00:36:06 [Zack Katz]
Like, because the the implicit, I I imagine implicitly people wanna try to write it in English, and that results in tickets that for non English native speakers, the quality of the tickets is terrible.

00:36:19 [Zack Katz]
If you've done customer support, you realize, how much is lost in translation when somebody tries to say what's going on with their very specific website issue or plug in issue.
00:36:30 [Zack Katz]
So I'm I'm thinking we add that, and then maybe automatically have another field get translated after the plug after the, support ticket is submitted that translates it automatically using a OpenAI.
00:36:44 [Zack Katz]
You know, there are so many cool things you could do.
00:36:47 [Zack Katz]
Use IP address to like, the I I just love AI how it opens up the automation and the ability for for us to spend more time doing stuff like this that otherwise would have taken weeks or months to to implement, where we can just say, like, let's have a two day project, Steve, you know, like you were saying.
00:37:07 [Zack Katz]
Let's let's have a sprint, a little minor sprint, and see what we can do and to improve our customers' experience on this.

00:37:14 [Steve Jones]
No.
00:37:14 [Steve Jones]
That's great.
00:37:15 [Steve Jones]
And I think that's something we should all be looking at refining and and making better.
00:37:19 [Steve Jones]
And and like you said, even something as small as a just a a sentence that says, hey.
00:37:24 [Steve Jones]
We're we're being inclusive to people that speak different languages.

00:37:27 [Steve Jones]
We don't assume that you speak English.
00:37:29 [Steve Jones]
You know, speak to us in whatever you're comfortable with.
00:37:32 [Steve Jones]
That is it's great feedback.

00:37:34 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:37:34 [Katie Keith]
The thing is, what if everything else is in English?
00:37:38 [Katie Keith]
So they've had to navigate there in English Right.
00:37:40 [Katie Keith]
And the form is in English.
00:37:42 [Katie Keith]
If you translate, there's always gonna be something that isn't your knowledge base and all of that.

00:37:47 [Katie Keith]
It's really hard to be fully consistent.
00:37:50 [Katie Keith]
Or maybe, like the emails as well that they receive after they buy the product.
00:37:55 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:37:55 [Katie Keith]
Sure.
00:37:55 [Katie Keith]
They can translate it in the browser easily enough, but it's very hard to be all encompassing into your support for translations.

00:38:04 [Zack Katz]
Katie, why aren't we translating our emails?
00:38:07 [Zack Katz]
This this is easy.
00:38:09 [Zack Katz]
Like, that's an easy win, to have a, tab for our customers, and I assume that these translation plugins have it, like, what language do you speak and then have, have emails sent in their language.
00:38:20 [Zack Katz]
That would be so easy to do.

00:38:22 [Katie Keith]
But we're not even translating our websites yet though.

00:38:24 [Zack Katz]
Yeah.
00:38:25 [Zack Katz]
The emails I think are more important though.
00:38:26 [Zack Katz]
Like, I don't know, like, does Apple Mail, for example, have built in translations?
00:38:31 [Zack Katz]
Not that I'm aware of.
00:38:33 [Zack Katz]
But browsers do if people use Gmail.

00:38:35 [Zack Katz]
But,

00:38:36 [Katie Keith]
it's gonna I only know Gmail, and that's fine.
00:38:39 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:38:40 [Katie Keith]
So we've got some comments from Ian again at Gaba what they do at Kestrel.
00:38:45 [Katie Keith]
He says, we copied Zach with the AI translations in product, and people have only complained once about a single word that was sort of imprecise.
00:38:54 [Katie Keith]
I think that's a good point.

00:38:56 [Katie Keith]
Humans also do make mistakes with translations and this that's a good success rate, isn't it?

00:39:03 [Zack Katz]
And when humans break translations, it can cause fatal errors.
00:39:08 [Zack Katz]
We have had, twice, I think, in our ten year run for GravityView, we've had human translated, strings that missed a, placeholder.
00:39:18 [Zack Katz]
And if you only if you have a mismatch of the number of placeholders in the string, that causes a fatal error and brings down a site.
00:39:23 [Zack Katz]
So we distributed a translation that we didn't review because we just had people doing it volunteer basis.
00:39:30 [Zack Katz]
I think AI translations are going to be not only more precise, but also less likely to break customer sites.

00:39:39 [Katie Keith]
Yep.
00:39:39 [Katie Keith]
It's always improving.
00:39:41 [Katie Keith]
And Ian goes on to say, we disclose that we're translating support and then include the English after their language too.
00:39:49 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:39:49 [Katie Keith]
That's quite a nice way to do it.

00:39:50 [Katie Keith]
So I I think I've done that in the past, although we don't have a policy where I might write Google Translate colon and then the Italian and then the English.
00:39:59 [Katie Keith]
I suppose that covers you if you are concerned about it being inaccurate or something like that.

00:40:05 [Zack Katz]
Right.
00:40:09 [Zack Katz]
Well, I'm I'm excited about all the different things that we, that we can talk that we can implement after our conversation today, including I'm gonna email some I'm gonna translate some emails.

00:40:23 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:40:23 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:40:24 [Katie Keith]
There's a lot to cover, isn't there?
00:40:25 [Katie Keith]
It's really weird because we sell internationally.
00:40:28 [Katie Keith]
Anybody in the world can go on our website and buy our products, and yet there's all this stuff to think about even so.

00:40:35 [Zack Katz]
So I did there is another aspect of international sales and marketing and stuff that I think we should probably cover, which is the aspect of color and color having different meanings.
00:40:48 [Zack Katz]
And an easy one to describe is red in, you know, English speaking languages is often associated with stop or bad or warning or danger.
00:40:59 [Zack Katz]
And red in China and other, you know, Asian countries is often associated with prosperity and and, good good luck.
00:41:08 [Zack Katz]
And so when you're translating a a page, it might have unintended side effects that, where if you seem almost native, in the language, but you have other cultural cues that don't aren't fully, understood, it might have a mixed message that could result in issues.
00:41:31 [Zack Katz]
So just be aware of cultural sensitivity stuff, not just translating words.

00:41:36 [Katie Keith]
Should we be sending our designers on international color courses or something?
00:41:42 [Katie Keith]
Because you don't want a different color scheme for different cultures, but maybe if they could be aware and they could go for something that is appropriate for their call to action color and so on in all around the world.

00:41:54 [Zack Katz]
Yeah.
00:41:54 [Zack Katz]
Call to action buttons, I think, especially.
00:41:57 [Zack Katz]
And then you you might as well take a screenshot of your landing page and send it to chat GPT and say, hey.
00:42:04 [Zack Katz]
What's there to fix here?

00:42:06 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:42:07 [Katie Keith]
That would work.
00:42:07 [Katie Keith]
Like, red buttons are a real no no in most of the worlds, but, that might really encourage people to buy in China.
00:42:16 [Katie Keith]
But then China is a whole another issue.
00:42:18 [Katie Keith]
We get almost no traffic, no sales from China.

00:42:22 [Katie Keith]
I tried to do deals with people from China who approached me.
00:42:26 [Katie Keith]
They said, for example, that they would translate our blog posts into Chinese and publish them on their own website.
00:42:32 [Katie Keith]
Nothing.
00:42:33 [Katie Keith]
We've just never cracked China.
00:42:35 [Katie Keith]
Do you two have many sales in China?

00:42:38 [Steve Jones]
No.
00:42:39 [Steve Jones]
No.
00:42:39 [Steve Jones]
Taiwan,

00:42:41 [Zack Katz]
we we Taiwan's up there in, like, top 25 countries.

00:42:46 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:42:46 [Katie Keith]
But that's not China.

00:42:48 [Zack Katz]
No.

00:42:48 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:42:50 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:42:52 [Steve Jones]
Yeah.
00:42:52 [Steve Jones]
I think that, you know, sure.
00:42:54 [Steve Jones]
We've got tax and we've got translations and stuff.

00:42:56 [Steve Jones]
And I think, like, since we got an accessibility guy here, I think that it I'd be remiss not to kinda lean in on that a little bit here and kinda say selling internationally or even, you know, local to The US, accessibility is is a is a huge consideration, especially for selling, you know, website products, whether it be a theme or a plug in.
00:43:20 [Steve Jones]
In The United States, we have, you know, we have the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and we have section five zero eight, laws which, you know, require that entities that take on federal funds actually make their websites accessible, that they have to have a certain level of comply of compliance with with WCAG guidelines.
00:43:44 [Steve Jones]
And more recently, just, like, last month, the European, Accessibility Act went into effect.
00:43:53 [Steve Jones]
And, this requires that European countries actually meet, and I think it's it goes way more it's way more broad than even The US where The US is limited to, you know, federal you know, people that take on federal funds.
00:44:11 [Steve Jones]
I think this the European accessibility act extends to most businesses have to, create, you know, accessible websites.

00:44:19 [Steve Jones]
And there are thresholds.
00:44:21 [Steve Jones]
Sure.
00:44:21 [Steve Jones]
Like, I think in the European Accessibility Act, it's, like, 10 plus employees for your company, $2,000,000 in revenue, or, I think in Europe, they call it turnover.
00:44:32 [Steve Jones]
So if you're selling internationally, be it you're selling from Europe or you're selling from The US, I think that accessibility is a huge consideration for your product.
00:44:41 [Steve Jones]
And then and giving the your customers that comfort, that you can say, hey.

00:44:47 [Steve Jones]
We've developed this plug in to be accessible, and it and it will meet the European, accessibility act, or it will comply with the, you know, the American with Disabilities Act.

00:44:59 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:44:59 [Katie Keith]
We do get presales inquiries about that.
00:45:02 [Katie Keith]
Are our plug ins accessible to their local standard?
00:45:05 [Katie Keith]
Often, we don't know.
00:45:06 [Katie Keith]
It's like a specific state in The US or something.

00:45:09 [Katie Keith]
So we try to answer positively with what we do know, or what we would do if they found an issue or something, but, you do need to do what you can with that.

00:45:22 [Zack Katz]
Yeah.
00:45:22 [Zack Katz]
And, Ian writes, we added some milestone notices and a few plugins and tried to add personality phrases like hot dog or Calabonga led to, as as an emphasis, led to very confusing translation.

00:45:37 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:45:37 [Katie Keith]
I can see that.
00:45:38 [Katie Keith]
I mean, a hot dog definitely means multiple things, doesn't it?
00:45:42 [Katie Keith]
It means Why does it say

00:45:43 [Zack Katz]
hot dog?
00:45:44 [Zack Katz]
Some water.

00:45:47 [Katie Keith]
Or the food or whatever.
00:45:50 [Katie Keith]
It's it's interesting, isn't it?
00:45:52 [Katie Keith]
You try to add personality, but actually that's very culturally specific often.
00:45:56 [Katie Keith]
I often think about that with the language that I'm using, because I think would a non native English speaker have been taught this word, and often they wouldn't have done.

00:46:07 [Zack Katz]
Right.
00:46:08 [Zack Katz]
And another idea that this episode has inspired in me is, we have easy digital downloads populating our Readmes, but our Readmes are in English.
00:46:16 [Zack Katz]
We do pass along to that request the trans the language that the site is using.
00:46:23 [Zack Katz]
So it would not it would not be hard for us to serve a different Readme in different languages, which would be a good thing to do.

00:46:31 [Steve Jones]
No.
00:46:31 [Steve Jones]
That's a I'm adding that to my to do list.

00:46:37 [Katie Keith]
Okay.
00:46:37 [Katie Keith]
Well, I think we have covered many different aspects of the international side of things, and there are a lot of aspects to consider.
00:46:44 [Katie Keith]
So let's bring it together and move on to our best advice, on where to get started with this.
00:46:51 [Katie Keith]
So what's the one piece of advice you'd give to somebody?
00:46:55 [Katie Keith]
So do you wanna go first, Steve?

00:46:57 [Steve Jones]
Sure.
00:46:58 [Steve Jones]
So my advice would be to I'm always looking for maximum impact for minimum effort.
00:47:06 [Steve Jones]
Right?
00:47:06 [Steve Jones]
And I think, as far on the accessibility side, there's a free plugin called Accessibility Checker that you could download.
00:47:15 [Steve Jones]
Uh-huh.

00:47:16 [Steve Jones]
That is Interesting.

00:47:18 [Zack Katz]
That's too much to tell you.

00:47:19 [Steve Jones]
How convenient.
00:47:20 [Steve Jones]
It's extremely full featured.
00:47:22 [Steve Jones]
Our full rule set is in there, and you can start working on, resolving and identifying accessibility issues on your websites, like, today.

00:47:35 [Zack Katz]
That's good advice.

00:47:36 [Steve Jones]
It actually tries to fix some.
00:47:38 [Steve Jones]
But, overall, I would I would I would say, like, in accessibility, we're always we're we're always stressing the importance of shifting left, which is basically, you know, implementing accessibility from the start.
00:47:54 [Steve Jones]
And and I think if you're if you're creating a a WordPress product these days, you know, we're we're in the we're in the times of AI being able to generate plugins super quick.
00:48:04 [Steve Jones]
Right?
00:48:05 [Steve Jones]
But, I would take steps and measures to think about your product as an international product and what can you implement now that's going to save you lots of time later.

00:48:16 [Steve Jones]
If you if you just start translating strings inside of your or making your strings translatable inside of your products, when it comes time to implement those translations, you're gonna be so much further ahead of the ball.
00:48:28 [Steve Jones]
You don't wanna get into a product where you have ten, twenty thousand lines of code and you realize, hey.
00:48:33 [Steve Jones]
We haven't translated any of these.
00:48:36 [Steve Jones]
And and now you have to go back into a major refactor, which can be very disruptive to your to your, you know, your release schedule and your product itself and and can introduce bugs.
00:48:48 [Steve Jones]
So just try to think of your product as an international product from the start.

00:48:52 [Steve Jones]
Think about privacy.
00:48:53 [Steve Jones]
Think about accessibility.
00:48:54 [Steve Jones]
Think about tax, and think about translations.

00:48:58 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:48:59 [Katie Keith]
My advice would be, yeah, do what's proportionate to the scale and stage of your business.
00:49:04 [Katie Keith]
So you should always meet legal requirements.
00:49:07 [Katie Keith]
The simplest way you use accessibility checker for the accessibility.
00:49:12 [Katie Keith]
Think about things like the VAT side of things.

00:49:16 [Katie Keith]
If you wanna keep it simple, use something like Freemius.
00:49:19 [Katie Keith]
If you're using EDD, then use my plug in.
00:49:21 [Katie Keith]
If we're doing shameless plugs like Steven.
00:49:25 [Katie Keith]
And but whatever you do, think of something that's right for the scale of your business.
00:49:29 [Katie Keith]
If you're just starting, you shouldn't be translating your website into every language, for example.

00:49:35 [Katie Keith]
You probably shouldn't be doing multi currency.
00:49:38 [Katie Keith]
These are all things that you can do as your business grows.
00:49:41 [Katie Keith]
So I'd say choose the level that's right for you now and keep assessing that in the future.
00:49:47 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.

00:49:48 [Zack Katz]
And for me, based on, Taco at Yoast saying that it didn't really pay to try to, focus on different markets, internationally, I would say don't.
00:49:59 [Zack Katz]
I think I think make sure that you're translatable.
00:50:02 [Zack Katz]
Make sure you follow international law.
00:50:05 [Zack Katz]
But,

00:50:05 [Katie Keith]
Yeah.
00:50:05 [Katie Keith]
I'm gonna email him actually and get some more information.

00:50:08 [Steve Jones]
Oh,

00:50:08 [Zack Katz]
yeah.
00:50:09 [Zack Katz]
Please do.

00:50:09 [Katie Keith]
I was starting a project on that, so so I'm just

00:50:12 [Zack Katz]
writing a few notes.
00:50:13 [Zack Katz]
Question, is it worth it?
00:50:14 [Zack Katz]
And the answer apparently is no.
00:50:16 [Zack Katz]
I think a good landing page is a good landing page, and and anything we can focus on for that would be great.
00:50:21 [Zack Katz]
And I do think perhaps loading in different style sheets based on IP addresses makes sense and having different color schemes perhaps and, like, maybe even translating.

00:50:30 [Zack Katz]
But, it seems like a lot more work than maybe is, necessary to close that sale.
00:50:37 [Zack Katz]
So my my advice is, don't don't worry about it as and focus on building and releasing accessible translatable plugins.

00:50:47 [Katie Keith]
Yep.
00:50:48 [Katie Keith]
Sounds good.
00:50:49 [Katie Keith]
Well, that's a wrap.
00:50:50 [Katie Keith]
Thank you, Steve, so much for joining us.
00:50:53 [Katie Keith]
Where can people find you online?

00:50:55 [Steve Jones]
Sure.
00:50:55 [Steve Jones]
Well, thanks for having me.
00:50:57 [Steve Jones]
You can find me at equalizedigital.com, stevejones.blog, and pretty much everywhere else on the socials at stevejonesdev.

00:51:09 [Zack Katz]
Alright.
00:51:10 [Zack Katz]
Well, next week, our cohost, Matt Cromwell, and I will be chatting with Matt Batchelder about the infrastructure and tools of running a WordPress business.
00:51:18 [Zack Katz]
I love this topic.
00:51:20 [Zack Katz]
So put it in your calendar now.
00:51:22 [Zack Katz]
Don't miss it.

00:51:23 [Zack Katz]
It's gonna be a good one.

00:51:26 [Katie Keith]
Yep.
00:51:26 [Katie Keith]
And special thanks to Post Status for being our green room.
00:51:30 [Katie Keith]
If you're enjoying these shows, then do us a favor and click, and hit like, subscribe, share it with your friends, put the show in your podcast and newsletters, and mention it everywhere.
00:51:40 [Katie Keith]
And don't forget to tune in again next week.
00:51:42 [Katie Keith]
Bye.