Attracting International Audience Through Website’s Multilingualism : Finnish e-retailing industry
Almeghari, Hani (2018)
Lataukset:
Almeghari, Hani
Yrkeshögskolan Arcada
2018
All rights reserved
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2018060111855
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2018060111855
Tiivistelmä
This thesis studies the role of multilingualism in e-retailing business in terms of its impact on the international web-traffic and how it could attract a foreign audience to the commercial website (webshop). The global growth in e-commerce and the development of the internet capabilities in online business enables the international possibilities for the e-retailing, however, in Finland, the e-retailers’ investments in foreign languages and in serving foreign markets is still the lowest in comparison with other Nordic countries which might cut their chances of being visible and exposed to international audience. In that context, the literature review focused mainly on the role of multilingualism in the internationalization of the online business, especially in e-retailing, while the empirical research was conducted
through three different approaches: First by conducting a correlation study to examine the relationship between the percentage of the international traffic and the number of available languages in the tested webshops, the second approach was implementing an experiment to test the impact of the added foreign languages to a Finnish webshop on attracting international traffic (possible causal relationship), and the third approach was conducting two
expert-interviews to provide a deep understanding and explanation of how and why such results were acquired. Based on the research findings, it could be argued that the multilingualization of the webshop is the foundation required to internationalize the Finnish e-retailing business, while other online and offline marketing techniques need to be built on that to drive the right and the most relevant audience for an e-retailing business. Therefore,(after detecting the abroad business opportunity) adding the local language(s) of the target foreign market(s) to an existed webshop is the basis for e-retailers to make their business visible at that market(s) and to attract a relevant international audience for the business.
through three different approaches: First by conducting a correlation study to examine the relationship between the percentage of the international traffic and the number of available languages in the tested webshops, the second approach was implementing an experiment to test the impact of the added foreign languages to a Finnish webshop on attracting international traffic (possible causal relationship), and the third approach was conducting two
expert-interviews to provide a deep understanding and explanation of how and why such results were acquired. Based on the research findings, it could be argued that the multilingualization of the webshop is the foundation required to internationalize the Finnish e-retailing business, while other online and offline marketing techniques need to be built on that to drive the right and the most relevant audience for an e-retailing business. Therefore,(after detecting the abroad business opportunity) adding the local language(s) of the target foreign market(s) to an existed webshop is the basis for e-retailers to make their business visible at that market(s) and to attract a relevant international audience for the business.