How To Reach New Markets Fast With AI — Bryan Murphy | What 87% Of Shoppers Want, Why Language Drives Sales, Why Ecom Needs AI Localization, Why Localized Content Improves Customer Experience, Why Shopify Needs Ongoing Localization (#416)

In this episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break Podcast, we explore how AI is revolutionizing the way e-commerce brands expand into new markets. 

Join us as we chat with Bryan Murphy, CEO of Smartling, about the transformative power of AI in translation and localization. 

Discover how brands can now create a seamless, localized shopping experience for customers worldwide, breaking down barriers and boosting conversion rates. 

Tune in to learn about the latest AI advancements and how they can give your business a competitive edge in the global market. 

Topics discussed in this episode:  

• Why localizing content creates better customer experiences. 
• How Smartling automates translation with AI. 
• What 87% of consumers expect in online shopping. 
• Why continuous localization matters for Shopify stores. 
• How AI cuts translation time and costs. 
• What Smartling does to grow global reach. 
• Why language impacts buying decisions. 
• How ASOS boosted conversions with Smartling. 
• What’s next for AI in e-commerce localization. 
• Why e-commerce brands should adopt AI localization. 

Links & Resources 

Website: https://www.smartling.com/
Shopify App: https://www.smartling.com/integrations/shopify
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanmurphy2/

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
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Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:02.894)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break Podcast. In today's episode, we're diving into how store owners and e-commerce brands can reach new markets using AI. Going global used to be a very long process. That means long delays, high cost, lots of manual work, but not anymore. With smart tools and AI, now you can create a shopping experience that feels local to every customer, no matter where they are.

As always, I'm joined by an expert today. It's Brian Murphy. He joins me and he is the CEO of Smartling, a leading AI translation platform trusted by global brands like British Airways, Shopify, and Lyft. With a proven track record of scaling tech companies, Brian brings over two decades of leadership experience in SaaS, e-commerce, and retail. So we have a lot to cover. Let's welcome him to the show. Hi, Brian. How are you today?

I'm great, Klaus. Good to talk with you.

Brian, going global, what's the biggest mistake that you see stores doing?

I've been building e-commerce and SaaS companies for the past 25 years and they've all been global. They've all needed translation and localization. And I think that one of the big misperceptions is that going global, right, is painful, slow, a lot of effort and quite expensive. And that is true from a traditional perspective. And I'll kind of caveat this. I'll just say right in front, I wish I'd known about SmartLink 15 years ago. It would have saved me a lot of time and effort, sometimes I think we're a relatively little known company.

Speaker 1 (01:24.962)
When you think about going global, right, the key thing to remember is that 87 % of consumers, customers state that they won't buy unless the website that they're buying from is in their language, right? So I always think about two things. I think about conversion rate and I think about digital footprint. And those are essentials to, to growth, regardless of the market. And it's that much more so difficult if you're growing it in international markets.

No, makes perfect sense. I just had the case this morning with a client of mine where basically there were like two languages on one page. Very confusing, definitely not helping in selling anything. But tell me, how does a store owner know when they are ready to sell into other countries?

Usually there are signals, right? So you're getting traffic from another country. You're getting email requests from customers in that particular country. That's usually a pretty good signal that there's, there's some pull. I also just think though, that if you've got a product that you know is popular, especially if you use search tools to determine popularity of a product, et cetera.

In that country, that's probably a market that you can get into. And you know, these days it's a lot easier. I mean, when I first got started in this business, when we launched e-commerce companies, I'm going to build our own servers. had to build right our own software application, right? If you remember those days, it was really difficult, really expensive. You really had to think hard about expansion. Now with tools like Shopify and Amazon, I mean, that global platform already exists. So it's, it's really a question of, okay, where do I think that there's going to be demand for my product? And then it boils down to.

localization, right? Translation and localization. And once again, in the past, it used to be really time consuming, expensive and slow to do that translation localization. Now with tools like SmartLink, which is you can think about is what Shopify and Amazon did for e-commerce platforms. SmartLink does for translation localization, really takes all the effort out of it, automates the process, instant turnaround times and very high quality at a very

Speaker 1 (03:21.622)
affordable price. That's that's sort of to me like the unlock and the game changer.

Let's talk about translation localization. So localization obviously is a lot of things. It's not only just a simple translated word. What do we understand with localization? What goes into localization?

So many people are familiar with translation that use Google Translate or something like that. You get a translation, right? If you've used it, I use it, we use it in our business. I can put a sentence in there, it'll give me a sentence back. I'm like, okay, I got the gist of that. But clearly it was translated with machine translation, right? What localization is, is it plugs in, basically you can think about the cultural nuances.

and that localized experience so that now you've got a translation that sounds like it's in German or it's in French or from a German or French speaker and hyper localized. We'll even take the language Spanish, for example. It's not just translating into Spanish, right? There's Spain Spanish, there's Mexico Spanish, there's Central American Spanish, there's South American, you know, like there's a lot of different variants. so those words and the pronunciations.

the nomenclature is slightly different. And so it's really important that you match that regional flavor.

Speaker 2 (04:32.482)
I think it's very important that I can tell from experience I'm based in Buenos Aires here and my Colombian Spanish does not really work here. So when you go really deep and you do your research where you want to sell, how do you decide which for instance like Spanish, which kind of direction you go with the localization? How deep do you go into it?

this is where a platform like smart link takes that guesswork out of it, right? So in our platform, we offer all of those variants of Spanish and can automate that localization for you. So regardless of what country you're in, smart link will automate that translation to that localized area, if that makes sense. So you don't have to think about is the main thing. And then what's really remarkable with what we're doing with AI. So if we'll kind of get to AI for a moment, like so traditional machine translation is fast, it's cheap and it's

Fairly accurate. It's fit for purpose for lots of sort of low end use cases, but it hasn't been accurate enough or localized enough to be used for an important use case. would say AI now is solving that problem. It's a large language model. It's very good at taking that machine translation and solving very specific translation localization problems, right? To make it more fluent, to make it more accurate and really importantly, to be able to inject brand voice tone.

and glossary appropriately into that translation. So now, you if you take our customers like IBM or Pepsi or somebody like that, not only the translation is accurate and localized, but they have the same brand voice, tone of voice and correct terminology for that specific brand and vertical. And that's huge unlock because that was something that was really prior to AI had to be done by a human, right? Which is

slow and expensive. So now we're being able to automate all of that with AI and with really tremendous results.

Speaker 2 (06:24.718)
You already sort of answered one of my questions that I was like brand language. I know a lot of brand managers will be like, yeah, it needs to be in our style, our tone, our voice. How do you train the AI to get that right?

There's two modes. One is we do AI engineering, right? So we have, I'll give you an example. We have a, we have what we call smoothing prompt. That's about 6,000 words long. Okay. So that prompt, right? It's highly engineered now to solve very specific linguistic problems. That does a very, very good job with that. We have another engineered prompt that mitigates hallucinations, right? So one of the things about AI is it does tend to hallucinate and there's not a great solution for that.

So we have a hallucination mitigation technology in place, which basically reads the translation, re-checks the source and make sure it's accurate. And it hasn't made something up. I'll give you an example. Sometimes in copy, there's an instruction, right? You can think about like a user guide, right? Sometimes AI reads that literally and it'll start creating instructions in the new language, right? So there's things that we do to put in place there.

So I think that those are some of the really important things that we do from a technology perspective, an engineering perspective. Then we take content, right? So we'll train the AI with your brand, with content, right? We'll also take your glossary and your style guide, and it will train the AI and create a custom model for you using that content. And that's really powerful.

kind of interesting. So you really nail it down to the brand, to what they do. Now, I can imagine a lot of store managers will say, yeah, but we have a high turnover. We have lots of products coming in and out. How can we apply this translation to what we do? How does that work? You're working with bigger brands. I think that's a common problem. Walk me through it. How does it work?

Speaker 1 (08:22.062)
I'll give you an example. We implement what we call continuous localization, right? So let's take Shopify, for example. So we have a Shopify connector that automates the translation of Shopify stores, right? So that's a hosted integration. It's completely API driven, eliminates the need for manual exporting, copy pasting, and proxy solutions, which is really essential because when you're talking about a product catalog, some of our customers have millions of SKUs that result in

hundreds of millions of lines of product information, right? That's very difficult. It's constantly changing. The SKUs are changing. The copy is changing, right? So the only way to manage that at scale is through continuous localization. So essentially SmartLink detects the changes in previously translated products. So let's say you make a change to a SKU or even to a line of product information. So we're constantly detecting changes automatically of those previously translated products, categories, pages,

And then automatically route that for translation either instantly with machine translation or AI translation or adding a human to the loop if that's the desired protocol. But the simplest way to explain it is that. I, I'm a product manager. I'm adding up like a hundred thousand skews, whatever it doesn't matter. One hundred thousand. I'm changing the lines of code. Our connector automatically picks that up and automatically translates it for you to your chosen languages.

That's quite impressive, specifically with this volume. Now, you said that you have a Shopify integration. What other kind of APIs and integrations do you offer?

We have integrations into probably over 50 different e-commerce and content management stacks. So all of the major ones that you would think about. So all the Adobe products, Contentful, Content Stack, SAP, Shopify, et cetera. So just about every major e-commerce platform that you can think about, we've got an integration to that platform.

Speaker 2 (10:16.494)
Can you walk me through the integration process? What kind of steps are involved? Is there any kind of homework that a merchant needs to do before they can get started?

It ranges from these super simple like user, you know, type in your username and password, you're up and running to if you've got more of a custom solution, we may have to do some, some tweaking on the backend. So our, customers are typically up and live within 24 hours. They're translating fully, you know, sort of automated. It might take two weeks and you're up and running, but the vast majority of our customers are up and running within 30 days. And that includes even the ones that need some custom work. So I'll give you an example. So we.

When you come on board with us, first thing we do is we offer you a free consultation. We'll ask you, what's your tech stack like? What is it like? Are you using Zendesk for customer servers? Are you using Shopify, Contemplate, whatever it is. Then we have solution architects that will listen to this conversation and then we will give you back, here are the one, two or three options for you to get up and running depending on what your needs are. And once we agree to that, then we have technical people that actually go through.

project people that will help manage the project and get the project up and running for you. So it's a pretty painless process from our perspective. It's interesting. It's this marrying of our customers typically have pretty complex needs, right? So we have to support that with the service element, you know, so with highly skilled people that make that onboarding process as seamless and painless for you as possible.

Do you have a case study or an example of a company you worked with? What kind of differences they saw in results basically at the end of the day? Because obviously every merchant wants to sell more and translation, localization is a tool to get there. What kind of difference do you see from going from one language to one more or many more?

Speaker 1 (12:04.59)
You know, so ASOS, you know, big, big company, big e-commerce company, 60 % of their sales come from international markets and they have an absolutely massive high velocity product catalog, right? That changes frequently and we're really struggling to keep up with just, they just weren't able to do it. So we were able to automate the translation of that product information catalog for them and create a localized online marketplace that matched the tone and the culture of each one of those international markets.

at scale. We were further able to optimize and help them create offerings that conform to local customer preferences and tastes. So this ability to create these kind of bespoke global international experiences by region really drove pretty significant improvement in engagement and conversion rate, probably doubling conversion rate.

As always, it's a good example. mean, it's a very well-known brand and they're really global. So I can think that a solution like yours really helps there. Who is working? You told me from your side, who's from your team working on helping implementing, but on a day-to-day basis within a brand, who's your normal contact? Store manager, marketing director, who are you talking to?

It depends on what we call the localization maturity curve. On a scale of one to five, what's your localization maturity curve? That's language nerd stuff. typically, if you're typically a big global enterprise, have a localization department, which typically sits within marketing, and that's a localization professional. And they might be a team of one to 50, just depending once again on the scale. So typically, we'll work with that department. They've got, you know,

localization specialists, localization engineers, et cetera, et Most often with retailers, we're working with the marketing and the merchandising teams, right? And so once again, there's a process of onboarding, getting the system up and running and integrated with your tech stack, right? And rarely, by the way, our tech stacks, clean tech stacks, right? They're usually what we call brownfield, like, well, we're using Contentful or we're using SAP, we're using Shopify, but...

Speaker 1 (14:12.61)
You know, we've customized it to do this and that and the other thing. there's usually, especially if they're bigger, they've been around for a while, there's some work that we do to make all that fit and work for them seamlessly. And then there's a conversation around how do you want to manage this? Do you want it to be totally automated, just lights out translation factory? We can do that and just like, and just rip. Some of them want to have a little bit more control. And so they say, you know what, we want these translations.

automatically created, but we want to have the opportunity to review them first. And that is done in platform. We have a whole bunch of quality analytics tools that helps them guide them through that process so they can look at it say, yes, I like that or no, I want to make a change to that. So the system's highly flexible to allow, once again, anything ranging from a total lights out translation factory to very, know, very hands on. We want to have, we want to have the ability to edit these translations.

No, that makes perfect sense. Who is your perfect customer? What kind of brands do you work with?

Oh gosh, once again, brands range from the very big next, so it's H &M, Wayfair, et cetera, down to emerging B2C brands that want to have localized experiences like Quince, for example, is an up and coming fabulous brand, B2C, and has a need to very rapidly expand their international markets.

Tell me about your pricing. How do you charge for these services?

Speaker 1 (15:37.368)
So typically it's a subscription fee. Once again, depending on what kind of system and needs you have. there's kind of a flat sort of subscription fee. And then we price by the word, right? So from a fraction of a penny up to several cents a word, depending on whether it's, it's machine translation at the lowest end, all the way up to transcreation on the highest end where we have a team of people where they actually, they're almost like advertising copywriters where customers will come to us and say, Hey, you know what?

We're very high end. We've got some very specific copy that we need to be developed where, and we actually have highly skilled linguists in countries specialized in language pair and vertical. And they're also professional advertising copywriters, right? So they'll take that content and they'll say that once again, in German or French or Japanese and construct just absolutely perfect copy and everything in between.

You're in the forefront of AI with translation and localization. I want to have a little bit of a outlook into the future. What's happening in the market? What can we expect for the future?

my God, it's wild. I'll tell you what, I've been doing this for a long time and I remember I got my start right in the beginning of the internet. And I kind of think of the world of like this tech world that we live in as having sort of three major phases. To me, obviously the commercialization of the internet was the first big phase. Like that changed the world, right? The world that we live in today. And the next big shift for me was going to the cloud.

Right. So also now this, but that was less noticed by people, but more like once again, I was describing, set the builder on servers, yada, yada, yada. Now we just use AWS. We just do it with mouse clicks, right? It allows us to scale so much better. That was, that was transformed of for businesses, right? The, phase that we're in this AI phase is I think the third phase in my opinion, and is as big, probably bigger, probably bigger than the beginning of the commercialization of the internet. Right. It's changing everything.

Speaker 1 (17:35.318)
And particularly in translation localization, right? So I was sort of describing like what used to take us days and 20 cents a word to translate. We're now doing instantly and for a fraction of that price and effort today as a result of AI. And the benefit to our customers is that, you know, the amount of content is growing exponentially, right?

There's not less content today than there was, you know, six months ago. There's more. And so companies, because of the effort and cost, ration how much they decide they want to translate. It's kind of like, remember we used to ration what you used to store, like, oh, I'm to delete these files, right? Cause it was expensive. It was a pain. When was the last time you went in and deleted a bunch of files? Cause you were running out of storage. You just don't do it anymore. So that's where translation localization is going is that in my opinion, we're, moving translation.

at removing to translation as a service in the same way that Shopify and Amazon created those those web services. Right. So automating it. So now our customers are able to translate eight times more eight times more content today for the same budget with near instant turnaround times that used to that, you know, than they could do six months ago. And if you ask me, OK, Brian, where's that going? I think, you know, we're on this curve. And if we talk again in a year, it'll probably be

16 times as much content for same budget and instant turnaround with near human to human quality. And that's transformative. So to kind of close the loop on that, what does that mean? Once again, when I was at eBay, I ran vertical markets globally. So I had this massive portfolio of businesses. And I thought about two things all the time, digital footprint and conversion rate.

And what we do at SmartLink is we have a huge impact on both of those things. So obviously we talked a little bit about conversion. It stands to reason that if I'm at Adidas or something and I want to buy some shoes, if it's in German, I don't really speak German. So I'm probably not going to buy those shoes. But if it's in English and it's in good English, I'll buy those shoes. Footprint is also equally important. And what is footprint? Footprint is like, how Google

Speaker 1 (19:53.87)
Right? Organic traffic is the lifeblood. Direct traffic has half the traffic at least, maybe more of retailers. Right? So Google looks, crawls your website and says, okay, this site is big. It's got great content. People engage with it. Right? So I'm going to send more search results there. Right? If you have teeny content in, let's say you're a US company and you're in France, right? If you have a teeny website, just the bare minimum in France, because it's expensive to translate, it's a pain.

And it's in English, let's say, so it's low engagement. What does Google think of that website? It's irrelevant, right? It doesn't send traffic there. So what we're helping our customers do is to unlock that global digital footprint with highly engaging, translated localized content cost effectively. That's a game changer. And then the conversion rate impact. It's a game changer for these companies.

I think it was a really like a masterclass in understanding how important translation is. I'm with you translating, I don't know, five, 10 years ago was a pain in the neck. now everything with AI, with the help of AI, it's a huge opportunity to just go to new markets to get better search ranking. Very important point, I think that is, and have better conversion rates. Now, before our coffee break comes to an end today to Brian, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet?

Probably the biggest thing to me is really kind of what we just covered. just know that like, once again, I've been at SmartLink for three and a half years now. I had no idea that there was companies like SmartLink around. Like we used to localize like as infrequently as possible because it was a pain and slow and expensive, right? You don't have to think that way anymore, right? You can have today, now, and then once again, the same way that you've got these e-commerce platforms, you got translation platforms like SmartLink that...

can transform your entire game and give you a huge competitive advantage in your global markets. And I think that that's really important for companies. That's probably the number one takeaway for companies to understand is that this service, this solution now exists.

Speaker 2 (21:53.531)
Sounds good. Where can people go to find out more about SmartLink?

SmartLink.com, take a look. We've got lots of information, a lot of webinars, and you can get yourself educated.

I will put a link in the show notes and you just one click away. Brian, that was very informative. I think that's the way to go. And with the help of AI, think a lot of merchants out there, lot of brands out there will grow into the right direction. We will see more brands on markets that they haven't been before. Thanks so much for your time today.

Claude, it's great talking with you, appreciate it.

Hey Klaus here, thank you for joining me on another episode of the E-Commerce Coffee Break Podcast. Before you go, I'd to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will also make it easier for others to discover the podcast. Simply like, comment and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast and even better if you could leave a rating. And finally, sign up for our free newsletter and become a smarter online seller in just five minutes.

Speaker 2 (22:46.274)
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