OVERVIEW
It is as easy as a click of the mouse to enable and being managing your Hotcakes Commerce store to sell your products and services to your visitors, whether they speak one or multiple languages. Hotcakes Commerce makes this amazingly simple and add to that the fact that the underlying CMS is fully capable of this kind of support too… Your online store will be more powerful than your competitors in no time at all!
REQUIREMENTS
In order to fully take advantage of the content in this article, you should have:
- Basic understanding of managing the CMS
- Superuser login on your website
- Basic understanding of the concept of multi-lingual website
You do not need to be an expert on multi-lingual websites by any means, but you certainly should understand the concept behind it before getting started.
GETTING STARTED
In today’s world, most sites would be missing a lot of potential leads and customers if they simply ignored those that speak other languages. Our research shows that everyone that speaks other languages also have money to spend at online stores. Luckily, we are here to make that transition easy for you.
Hotcakes Commerce is part of the CMS. This gives us a large amount of tools for you to take advantage of, including localization, or having a multi-lingual website. The CMS allows you to serve and manage your content in whatever primary language that the website user wants, provided that you have enabled it.
Once you enable a language in the CMS, this opens up your Hotcakes Commerce store to be able to take advantage of it too!
ENABLING & USING MULTIPLE LANGUAGES
The first thing you need to do in order to use multiple-languages in your Hotcakes store is to install the languages that you want to support in your CMS control panel.
Once there, choose the Available Extensions tab to see the out-of-the box languages that you want your site to respond to.
Click the Deploy button to install the languages that you want to support. Simply click next through the pop-up wizard to complete this process.
Please note that while these are languages come available out of the box, the CMS can technically support any language that you want.
Installing the language alone will not enable you to use it. Now, simply navigate to the Languages feature in your control panel.
Check the checkbox for each installed language that you wish to enable.
Now that you have installed and enabled the new language(s), the default design will show you options to toggle between the different languages. You can manually switch your language, but the CMS will automatically detect your primary language as well.
There are more steps that could be done to fully take advantage of the multi-lingual capabilities, but they are beyond the scope of this article.
At this point, you can return to your Hotcakes store administration area where you already are managing your products. This article will assume you’ve already added one or more products, categories, etc. If you do not have any yet, feel free to add the sample products to play with this feature. You can always remove them later.
Now that you have more than one language enabled, you can toggle between the languages at the top of the store administration. This does not change the environment for the merchant. It will continue to use English during your store management experience. However, this will switch the language you’re editing for the products, categories, and other attributes you are updating. The localizable (or multi-lingual) fields will be indicated by the icon like shown below.
Now that you know all of the basics, you can now begin editing your products and other catalog features to make your store cater to the non-English segments of customers as you would like. The image below shows you the difference that your customers could experience!
Need More Help?
Do you need more assistance with this article? Please review your support options.