The Realities of Selling WordPress Products Internationally

[00:00:00] Katie Keith: One thing I love about selling software online is that your business is automatically international.

[00:00:08] 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] However, there are still some important things that you need to know about selling internationally.

[00:00:21] Let's talk about them now.

[00:00:26] Intro: 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.

[00:00:40] It's your go to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress product owners.

[00:00:46] And now enjoy the show.

[00:00:53] Katie Keith: Hi.

[00:00:53] 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] Steve, welcome to the show.

[00:01:10] Thanks for joining us.

[00:01:11] Please introduce yourself.

[00:01:13] Steve Jones: Yeah.

[00:01:13] Well, thanks for having me, guys.

[00:01:15] My name is Steve Jones.

[00:01:16] I'm the cofounder and CTO of Equalize Digital.

[00:01:20] We specialize in accessibility software, services and training, including the accessibility checker plugin, which helps, ensure websites meet WCAG compliance.

[00:01:34] 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] 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] Right?

[00:02:11] And accessibility is all about being inclusive to everybody regardless of their abilities.

[00:02:15] Right?

[00:02:16] 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] 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] I think there's a business aspect to that as well too.

[00:02:44] Right?

[00:02:44] 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] That's very true.

[00:03:09] 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] But there's a lot of different threads to it.

[00:03:20] 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] Do you want to go first, Steve?

[00:03:32] 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] Sure.

[00:03:37] Totally.

[00:03:39] Yeah.

[00:03:39] 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] And and this was part of our our push to help support the European Accessibility Act.

[00:03:57] 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] Is it should we translate it all now?

[00:04:10] There's recently been a lot of developments in AI translations.

[00:04:15] Are those is it ethical to use AI translations?

[00:04:18] Right?

[00:04:19] You have all these questions about it.

[00:04:21] So there's the technical aspect of it.

[00:04:23] It is kind of the ethical aspect of it.

[00:04:25] And, and we kinda came to the determination that, hey.

[00:04:28] Let's spend a couple days, like, seeing if we could implement this, and those couple days turned into three weeks.

[00:04:35] But because Accessibility Checker is a suite of plugins at this this point.

[00:04:40] It's five, separate plugins.

[00:04:43] 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.

[00:04:56] And, there's different methods that you would take to translate, those different plugins in those different areas.

[00:05:05] 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] We had that, like, 9090% translated.

[00:05:26] And then a few other I have a screen.

[00:05:29] We could pull up my my screen here, and I can do the the show part of my show and tell.

[00:05:33] And I'll try to describe what I'm showing as we go along.

[00:05:36] Alright.

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

[00:05:38] Steve Jones: Okay.

[00:05:38] 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] 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] On the screen, I'm showing German at, like, 78%, translated and Dutch at 42% translated and Spanish at 14.

[00:06:12] And then it goes down a a few few languages.

[00:06:16] The interesting thing once you hit a certain threshold, it will actually initiate the translation on your wordpress.org play page.

[00:06:25] I'm looking at wordpress.org/plugins/accessibility-checker.

[00:06:31] So here you can see we have, five languages.

[00:06:37] And you can see that, like, once you hit a certain threshold, then it pops up here.

[00:06:40] 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] And

[00:06:56] Steve Jones: 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] 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] 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] 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] Right.

[00:07:37] And that is absurd.

[00:07:38] 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] So so, I'll answer that, but let me speak to what Zach said.

[00:08:00] Yes.

[00:08:00] 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] 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] So there's now more strings in there.

[00:08:19] And and the and the translate the translation contributors, actually, I think, has reduced the team has even reduced since COVID.

[00:08:29] So it's it's very hard to get this translated into all the languages that you need.

[00:08:34] So so to your point, what you to your question, Katie, we decided to go with this PTC.

[00:08:43] 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.

[00:08:51] So, I'm on ptc.wpml.org.

[00:08:57] And their catchphrase says here AI powered translation software.

[00:09:02] I think it's somewhere maybe they moved removed it.

[00:09:04] It says better than human translations every time.

[00:09:07] Right?

[00:09:08] 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] But, like, it's a good tagline.

[00:09:18] So what we did was we we kinda did a test.

[00:09:21] 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] And then we kinda put together a a build for Amber while she was in Europe.

[00:09:36] She grabbed a few people and said, hey.

[00:09:38] You know, you speak Dutch.

[00:09:39] You know, you speak German.

[00:09:40] Can you can you validate this?

[00:09:43] How does this look?

[00:09:44] And and and the feedback that she got was it it looks pretty good.

[00:09:49] 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] 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] You can define a dictionary term that should like, let it know that this means this.

[00:10:25] So when you say slug, you don't mean the slimy creature that crawls over your garden.

[00:10:29] You mean, the URL endpoint.

[00:10:33] So you can add dictionary terms like that and improve and refine.

[00:10:36] So when people who use your software say, hey.

[00:10:40] This string is improperly translated, you can fix that and will be fixed forever as you go forward.

[00:10:45] 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] Totally.

[00:10:54] 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] Like, and and, like, maybe and Dutch, it, like, means get it for free.

[00:11:06] You know?

[00:11:06] Intro: And

[00:11:06] Steve Jones: that's not exactly what we're saying.

[00:11:09] But, so I can walk you through a little bit too about that.

[00:11:13] So the way that this ptc.wpml.org works is you actually set it to watch, a GitHub branch.

[00:11:23] So we set it to watch our develop branch.

[00:11:25] 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] 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] So if there is a translation that somebody comes back to us and says, hey.

[00:12:16] This says, get accessibility checker, but it's pro and you're gonna charge me.

[00:12:21] But in my language, get means you're, like, giving it to me for free.

[00:12:25] 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] And any and it'll actually override that with what's with what's in our pot file.

[00:12:43] 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] 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] Steve Jones: 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] And also for the translators that don't know that get accessibility checker means purchase.

[00:13:21] Steve Jones: Yeah.

[00:13:21] Yeah.

[00:13:22] So so this was kind of a great tool for that.

[00:13:25] 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] I kinda skipped over that a little bit, but making sure you're using translation functions that wrap your strings.

[00:13:43] 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] And, and we were we're able to ensure that through our own linting and our own CI processes.

[00:14:01] 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] We kinda translated too many strings.

[00:14:19] So, we translated our own product names.

[00:14:23] 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] We don't wanna translate that.

[00:14:36] So in all languages, it's gonna be accessibility checker.

[00:14:40] And we can just manage that from here.

[00:14:42] We don't have to untranslate the string inside of all the plugins.

[00:14:46] 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] If you have short codes, you do not want the short codes to be translated if they include Good point.

[00:15:06] Words.

[00:15:07] Yeah.

[00:15:08] Steve Jones: It's a great point.

[00:15:09] 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] 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] 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] We had to build this into our CI.

[00:15:40] And I'll just kind of run through this real quick because it gets highly technical.

[00:15:47] But, basically, what we've done is we created a a workflow inside of GitHub.

[00:15:52] I'm I'm looking at github.com right now, and I'm looking at the accessibility checker repo.

[00:15:59] And I've I've pulled up a, a GitHub workflow.

[00:16:03] It's it's my developer named it make pot.

[00:16:06] I think he's being funny here.

[00:16:08] But, this is a workflow that generates a pot file.

[00:16:13] 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] Well, we don't wanna we don't wanna have to manually do that every time.

[00:16:26] So once you push up to a, to the develop branch, it's watching this workflow will run.

[00:16:32] 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] 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] 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] And you could actually just distribute the, dot m o file.

[00:17:10] And then and those work for PHP.

[00:17:13] For JavaScript, you gotta u use, JSON files for your translation strings.

[00:17:18] So this will generate the the pot file.

[00:17:21] It goes to PTC.

[00:17:23] PTC PTC watches that branch.

[00:17:26] It creates the translations.

[00:17:28] 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] And it'll actually generate the, JSON strings.

[00:17:40] We ran into some issues with PTC and JSON.

[00:17:43] 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] And we were we weren't able to really get that to work for the way we have things set up.

[00:17:57] So we actually will generate those ourselves with the same the same workflow after we get the translations back.

[00:18:06] And so you can see the the first PR here.

[00:18:09] This is our workflow it runs.

[00:18:12] I'm looking at a a new PR here.

[00:18:15] It's called update update transition files.

[00:18:18] So if I up, like like Zach said, he updates a string.

[00:18:21] He doesn't have we don't have to have a heart attack because we we updated a a string.

[00:18:28] This will actually just identify it.

[00:18:30] It it it will update the pot file.

[00:18:33] PTC will see this.

[00:18:34] 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] So we we have these.

[00:18:47] We've got all our translations.

[00:18:49] This is all done automatically, and it's gonna be done in CI.

[00:18:53] 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] 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] Good plan.

[00:19:21] So that is translating the actual plugins.

[00:19:24] But what about translating the information that lead people to buy our plugins?

[00:19:29] 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] 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] It's not a barrier for me if the website is Spanish only and not translated into English.

[00:19:59] 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] 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] And so apparently, we could improve our ranking significantly by translating our website.

[00:20:36] 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] And just to see and then we will measure, do we actually rank more highly?

[00:20:54] I'd love to know, do either of you translate your websites?

[00:20:55] Have you got any evidence that is it worth doing for either the user or for the SEO?

[00:20:55] So I was just reviewing a a product page for

[00:21:08] Zack Katz: 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] And, it looked great.

[00:21:15] It was it looked like a really good, product.

[00:21:18] I was sold, and then I got down to the bottom, and it said €219.

[00:21:23] I was like, what the hell?

[00:21:26] I don't know what euros are.

[00:21:28] I know they're less than they used to be compared to the US dollar or that US dollar is worse.

[00:21:33] It's they're more than that's the it made me think.

[00:21:37] And the goal with websites is don't make me think.

[00:21:40] 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] I don't think that we're losing sales other than the SEO opportunities because of translation.

[00:21:54] 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] And I got, I want I I hope to that we can talk about this.

[00:22:10] 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] Your products are amazing, and, they're really expensive here in India.

[00:22:23] What can you do?

[00:22:25] And I'm a start up.

[00:22:26] I don't have many, you know, much funds.

[00:22:28] 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] They're both relevant, and I do have experience of both of those.

[00:22:39] So we sell in seven currencies, based on the areas that the majority of our customers are.

[00:22:46] When we first introduced that, I didn't actually measure an increase in conversion rates, and I did check.

[00:22:53] But once you've done it, it's very hard to go back, so we've just kept it.

[00:22:56] But I don't have any numbers to say to you that's gonna improve your conversion rates.

[00:23:02] And we I've also tried custom country specific pricing specifically for India for the reason that you mentioned.

[00:23:10] 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] 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] So we set a manual price that was much lower for India and saw how that went.

[00:23:37] 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] So if we if it was a third of the price, then we tripled it, if that makes sense.

[00:23:54] Then we tripled the number.

[00:23:56] Therefore, profit was the same.

[00:23:58] 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] But we do set the currency pricing, based on some clever rules and things.

[00:24:11] It's not just an automatic translation.

[00:24:14] So there is that.

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

[00:24:18] Steve Jones: Yeah.

[00:24:18] We don't.

[00:24:19] We don't.

[00:24:20] 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] So we don't do any, you know, multicurrency pricing in that regard.

[00:24:34] 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] 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] It's interesting.

[00:24:57] It'd be an interesting experiment to to maybe pick a language.

[00:25:01] Like, we've had a lot of movement in in German for some reason.

[00:25:06] 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.

[00:25:16] 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] So it's definitely interesting.

[00:25:30] Zack Katz: Yeah.

[00:25:31] 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] Yeah.

[00:25:38] And

[00:25:38] if they did that

[00:25:38] And that's worrying, actually.

[00:25:40] They're still far

[00:25:41] Katie Keith: bigger than us.

[00:25:42] They would have much better data.

[00:25:44] So that's very interesting.

[00:25:45] Well, and that's the thing

[00:25:47] Zack Katz: 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] Same.

[00:26:10] Yeah.

[00:26:10] 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] Surely, there are customers there.

[00:26:22] And I've tried to target them in the past, and I'm using pay per click, specifically.

[00:26:29] 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] And if we cut our costs or if we cut the pricing, the margin goes down.

[00:26:44] We're not able to provide the same level of support.

[00:26:47] 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] 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] You can use our docs.

[00:27:16] You are not able to contact support without paying a higher amount.

[00:27:19] 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] 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] And we kind of we experienced the same thing.

[00:27:40] Right?

[00:27:40] 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] 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] 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] Or

[00:28:08] Zack Katz: fifth.

[00:28:09] You know?

[00:28:09] Or fifth language.

[00:28:09] Yeah.

[00:28:11] Steve Jones: Yeah.

[00:28:12] 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] 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] 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] 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] And

[00:28:45] Katie Keith: I

[00:28:45] think the web developers pretty much all do though, don't they?

[00:28:48] The Indian web developers have amazing English.

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

[00:28:52] Yeah.

[00:28:52] Zack Katz: Yeah.

[00:28:53] Yeah.

[00:28:53] The language barrier in India isn't so much an issue.

[00:28:56] I they also speak English as a first or second language, I believe.

[00:29:01] 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] 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] Definitely an issue.

[00:29:21] 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] 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.

[00:29:47] And they're like, what do I do with tax?

[00:29:49] I just know it's one of the bigger pain points.

[00:29:51] 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] It doesn't matter where your business is based.

[00:30:06] 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] 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] 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] It's a nightmare.

[00:30:40] 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] 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] That means that they're the merchant of record and not you, so they're responsible, but lots don't.

[00:31:09] 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] And EDD don't even make it possible.

[00:31:24] Same with WOO.

[00:31:24] 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] So, do either of you, do anything with European VAT?

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

[00:31:39] Zack Katz: I would be, hounded by Vova.

[00:31:44] Great.

[00:31:44] If I did not say, you know, Freemius is the probably easiest and best way to do this.

[00:31:52] 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] 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] 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] 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] 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] Yeah.

[00:32:40] I

[00:32:41] Katie Keith: wouldn't want that.

[00:32:42] We want

[00:32:42] to see that as

[00:32:42] you then.

[00:32:43] Zack Katz: Right.

[00:32:43] 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] So that would free up our support team to do you know, to spend more time on non billing issues.

[00:32:57] So there are some upsides and downsides.

[00:33:00] Steve Jones: Yeah.

[00:33:00] Yeah.

[00:33:01] Totally.

[00:33:01] 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] Right?

[00:33:09] Like, do you

[00:33:12] Yeah.

[00:33:12] But

[00:33:12] Katie Keith: you still need to do it.

[00:33:14] So b to b have to be able to prove they're a business by entering their VAT number.

[00:33:19] Right.

[00:33:19] And then that reverse charges the tax, and then you have to give them a certain type of invoice as evidence.

[00:33:24] So you have to comply either way even if your customers are businesses.

[00:33:28] It's really annoying.

[00:33:29] Steve Jones: Yeah.

[00:33:30] Yeah.

[00:33:31] Well, I mean, I know in The United States there's, you know, there's actually certain states.

[00:33:36] It's on a state by state basis, have certain, tax regulations about charging tax on digital products.

[00:33:44] And, but in The United States, a lot of times, it it's there's a threshold.

[00:33:48] Right?

[00:33:48] 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.

[00:33:57] 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] That's true.

[00:34:13] 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] Like, what what setups do you have?

[00:34:23] 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] 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] And, we typically our support is pretty straightforward.

[00:34:49] We have, you know, somebody that runs first tier support.

[00:34:51] 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.

[00:35:01] So we haven't really run into that issue too much.

[00:35:04] We do have native Spanish speakers on our team, if if if somebody did contact us that speaks, Spanish.

[00:35:13] But we have we luckily have not run into it, so far.

[00:35:19] Katie Keith: Yeah.

[00:35:20] So we keep doing that.

[00:35:21] We're putting on the same comments at the same time.

[00:35:24] So Ian says have Google Translate in another tab.

[00:35:28] I was about to say the same thing.

[00:35:30] So we do receive occasional support tickets in other languages.

[00:35:35] We just Google Translate it.

[00:35:37] Our support is almost all email or live chat based, so it's really easy to use an automatic translator.

[00:35:43] And so we try to reply in the customer's language.

[00:35:47] It doesn't matter that we can't check it there.

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

[00:35:51] Zack Katz: Yeah.

[00:35:51] 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] It's fine.

[00:36:05] You know?

[00:36:06] 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] 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.

[00:36:31] 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] You know, there are so many cool things you could do.

[00:36:47] 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] 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] That's great.

[00:37:15] And I think that's something we should all be looking at refining and and making better.

[00:37:19] And and like you said, even something as small as a just a a sentence that says, hey.

[00:37:24] We're we're being inclusive to people that speak different languages.

[00:37:27] We don't assume that you speak English.

[00:37:29] You know, speak to us in whatever you're comfortable with.

[00:37:32] That is it's great feedback.

[00:37:34] Katie Keith: Yeah.

[00:37:35] The thing is, what if everything else is in English?

[00:37:38] So they've had to navigate there in English Right.

[00:37:40] And the form is in English.

[00:37:43] If you translate, there's always gonna be something that isn't your knowledge base and all of that.

[00:37:47] It's really hard to be fully consistent.

[00:37:50] Or maybe, like the emails as well that they receive after they buy the product.

[00:37:55] Yeah.

[00:37:55] Sure.

[00:37:56] 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?

[00:38:08] This this is easy.

[00:38:09] 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.

[00:38:21] 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] The emails I think are more important though.

[00:38:26] Like, I don't know, like, does Apple Mail, for example, have built in translations?

[00:38:31] Not that I'm aware of.

[00:38:33] But browsers do if people use Gmail.

[00:38:35] But,

[00:38:35] it's gonna I

[00:38:36] Katie Keith: only know Gmail, and that's fine.

[00:38:39] Yeah.

[00:38:40] So we've got some comments from Ian again at Gaba what they do at Kestrel.

[00:38:45] 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] I think that's a good point.

[00:38:56] 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] 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] 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.

[00:39:24] So we distributed a translation that we didn't review because we just had people doing it volunteer basis.

[00:39:30] 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] It's always improving.

[00:39:41] 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] Yeah.

[00:39:49] That's quite a nice way to do it.

[00:39:50] 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] 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] 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.

[00:40:21] Yeah.

[00:40:23] Katie Keith: Yeah.

[00:40:23] There's a lot to cover, isn't there?

[00:40:26] It's really weird because we sell internationally.

[00:40:28] 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] 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] And red in China and other, you know, Asian countries is often associated with prosperity and and, good good luck.

[00:41:08] 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.

[00:41:30] So just be aware of cultural sensitivity stuff, not just translating words.

[00:41:37] Katie Keith: Should we be sending our designers on international color courses or something?

[00:41:41] Intro: Because

[00:41:42] Katie Keith: 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] Call to action buttons, I think, especially.

[00:41:57] 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] What's there to fix here?

[00:42:06] Katie Keith: Yeah.

[00:42:07] That would work.

[00:42:07] 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] But then China is a whole another issue.

[00:42:18] We get almost no traffic, no sales from China.

[00:42:22] I tried to do deals with people from China who approached me.

[00:42:26] They said, for example, that they would translate our blog posts into Chinese and publish them on their own website.

[00:42:32] Nothing.

[00:42:33] We've just never cracked China.

[00:42:35] Do you two have many sales in China?

[00:42:38] Zack Katz: No.

[00:42:39] No.

[00:42:39] Taiwan,

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

[00:42:46] Katie Keith: Yeah.

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

[00:42:48] Zack Katz: No.

[00:42:48] Yeah.

[00:42:50] Katie Keith: Yeah.

[00:42:50] Steve Jones: Yeah.

[00:42:52] I think that, you know, sure.

[00:42:54] We've got tax and we've got translations and stuff.

[00:42:56] 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.

[00:43:19] 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] And more recently, just, like, last month, the European, Accessibility Act went into effect.

[00:43:53] 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.

[00:44:09] I think this the European accessibility act extends to most businesses have to, create, you know, accessible websites.

[00:44:19] And there are thresholds.

[00:44:21] Sure.

[00:44:21] 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] 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] And then and giving the your customers that comfort, that you can say, hey.

[00:44:47] 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] We do get presales inquiries about that.

[00:45:01] Are our plug ins accessible to their local standard?

[00:45:05] Often, we don't know.

[00:45:06] It's like a specific state in The US or something.

[00:45:09] 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] 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] I can see that.

[00:45:38] I mean, a hot dog definitely means multiple things, doesn't it?

[00:45:43] It means Why does it say

[00:45:43] hot dog?

[00:45:44] Zack Katz: Some water.

[00:45:47] Katie Keith: Or the food or whatever.

[00:45:50] It's it's interesting, isn't it?

[00:45:52] You try to add personality, but actually that's very culturally specific often.

[00:45:56] 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] 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.

[00:46:17] We do pass along to that request the trans the language that the site is using.

[00:46:23] 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] That's a I'm adding that to my to do list.

[00:46:37] Katie Keith: Okay.

[00:46:37] 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] So let's bring it together and move on to our best advice, on where to get started with this.

[00:46:51] So what's the one piece of advice you'd give to somebody?

[00:46:55] So do you wanna go first, Steve?

[00:46:57] Steve Jones: Sure.

[00:46:58] So my advice would be to I'm always looking for maximum impact for minimum effort.

[00:47:06] Right?

[00:47:06] And I think, as far on the accessibility side, there's a free plugin called Accessibility Checker that you could download.

[00:47:15] Uh-huh.

[00:47:16] That is Interesting.

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

[00:47:19] How convenient.

[00:47:20] It's extremely full featured.

[00:47:22] Our full rule set is in there, and you can start working on, resolving and identifying accessibility issues on your websites, like, today.

[00:47:36] Zack Katz: That's good advice.

[00:47:36] It actually

[00:47:37] Steve Jones: tries to fix some.

[00:47:39] 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.

[00:47:53] 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] Right?

[00:48:05] 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] 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] You don't wanna get into a product where you have ten, twenty thousand lines of code and you realize, hey.

[00:48:33] We haven't translated any of these.

[00:48:36] 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] So just try to think of your product as an international product from the start.

[00:48:52] Think about privacy.

[00:48:53] Think about accessibility.

[00:48:54] Think about tax, and think about translations.

[00:48:58] Katie Keith: Yeah.

[00:48:59] My advice would be, yeah, do what's proportionate to the scale and stage of your business.

[00:49:04] So you should always meet legal requirements.

[00:49:07] The simplest way you use accessibility checker for the accessibility.

[00:49:12] Think about things like the VAT side of things.

[00:49:16] If you wanna keep it simple, use something like Freemius.

[00:49:19] If you're using EDD, then use my plug in.

[00:49:21] If we're doing shameless plugs like Steven.

[00:49:25] And but whatever you do, think of something that's right for the scale of your business.

[00:49:29] If you're just starting, you shouldn't be translating your website into every language, for example.

[00:49:35] You probably shouldn't be doing multi currency.

[00:49:38] These are all things that you can do as your business grows.

[00:49:41] So I'd say choose the level that's right for you now and keep assessing that in the future.

[00:49:46] Yeah.

[00:49:47] 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] I think I think make sure that you're translatable.

[00:50:02] Make sure you follow international law.

[00:50:05] But,

[00:50:05] Yeah.

[00:50:05] I'm

[00:50:06] Katie Keith: gonna email him actually and get some more information.

[00:50:08] Oh,

[00:50:08] yeah.

[00:50:08] Please

[00:50:09] Zack Katz: do.

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

[00:50:12] writing a few notes.

[00:50:13] Question,

[00:50:13] Zack Katz: is it worth it?

[00:50:14] And the answer apparently is no.

[00:50:16] 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] 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] But, it seems like a lot more work than maybe is, necessary to close that sale.

[00:50:37] So my my advice is, don't don't worry about it as and focus on building and releasing accessible translatable plugins.

[00:50:48] Katie Keith: Yep.

[00:50:48] Sounds good.

[00:50:49] Well, that's a wrap.

[00:50:50] Thank you, Steve, so much for joining us.

[00:50:53] Where can people find you online?

[00:50:55] Steve Jones: Sure.

[00:50:55] Well, thanks for having me.

[00:50:57] 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] 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] I love this topic.

[00:51:20] So put it in your calendar now.

[00:51:22] Don't miss it.

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

[00:51:26] Katie Keith: Yep.

[00:51:26] And special thanks to Post Status for being our green room.

[00:51:30] 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] And don't forget to tune in again next week.

[00:51:42] Bye.