When planning the future of your e-commerce, there are many things to consider. First of all, you need to decide whether you want to scale your business long-term. If the answer is that you don’t want to scale your business then this article is simply not for you. If you want your ecommerce business to grow in many markets and with many languages, read on.
WooCommerce, as you probably already know, is pretty easy to understand and get started with. Just as WordPress democratised digital publishing by putting publishing tools in the hands of many people, WooCommerce puts ecommerce tools in the hands of pretty much anyone who dreams of starting their own online business. Starting up a business working in a single language market is easy as pie, but when we need more, we need to think a little.
How do we scale up to our new markets?
When the time comes to scale up, we first need to make the critical business decisions about how to do it. How we decide to do these things will determine how we set up our architecture in WooCommerce.
- In which countries will we sell our product?
- How can we best penetrate this market?
- What content should we use for this market?
- How should we advertise?
- Which key players should we ally or co-operate with in this market?
- What languages are used in this market?
- How much time and money is required to maintain each language?
- What tax rules apply in each country?
- What other laws and regulations may apply?
- Where will we send the products?
- Do we need to change our shipping options for this market?
- What tariffs can the end customer expect?
- What payment options should we have for each country?
After answering these questions, we can create a plan for how to build and scale our ecommerce with WooCommerce.
Market, language or both?
Before we sit down and write code, we need to understand what a market is and what a language is. A market is usually a country where a certain set of rules apply. A language, on the other hand, is just that – a language.
Having answered the above questions, we can start thinking about our architecture. A very common case for our customers has been that a market also corresponds to a language, simply due to the fact that the management cost of having multiple languages in a market is often relatively high.
Multisite, Clustered Multisites, Multi-Multisite and Language Plugins
With WordPress Multisite we can build a network of sites that are linked together. We usually recommend using one site per language instead of using a plugin like Polylang or WPML for managing multiple languages in one site instance when working with Ecommerce. By instead using this approach along with a plugin like MultilingualPress, we can streamline each language and easily maintain connectivity between products with hreflang links etc between different sites.
This method works well when using one language per market. This is by far the most common among our clients, and is usually a good fit for fast growing companies.
For example, if we sell office accessories from Sweden to all EU countries, China and Russia, we would need a WordPress installation with a multisite. In this multisite we would create 4 websites.
This works fine if we would use one language per market, but what happens when we need multiple languages per market? Then we need to do one of two approaches; Either by using a kind of Clustered Multisite approach or by doing a Multi-Multisite approach.
The easy way: Clustered Multisites
Thanks to the great MultilingualPress plugin from Inpsyde, we can cluster and create relationships between multisites. With this approach we can, with MultilingualPress, build clusters of different sites in the multisite installation with each other. The architecture is basically flat, then we create the hierarchy by how we structure our domain names for the instances.
For example, you can have a site called en.eu.myshop.com which is connected to de.eu.myshop.com and it.eu.myshop.com so you have 3 sites for the EU shop. Then in the same multisite setup you have an .asia.myshop.com connected to jp.asia.myshop.com and zh.asia.myshop.com so you have 3 pages for the Asian store and so on.
Each site will be able to have its own currency and all the necessary settings for its market. What is a bit clunky though is the synchronisation between products. At the time of writing, it’s also not possible to configure things per “relationship group” (e.g. EU store or Asia store) and it’s not possible to synchronise the product (i.e. copy posts) across “relationship groups” with MultilingualPress, but both of these are in the works in the plugin’s roadmap.
Clustered Multisite also gives us the best possible compatibility with both WordPress core and plugins from WordPress.org.
The hard way: Multi-Multisites
If we want a clearer hierarchy, the Multi-Multisite approach can be relevant. This possibility is provided by using a plugin like Wp Multi Network. With this approach, we create several multi-sites within the installation, and within each multisite we connect sites with MultilingualPress to manage languages.
This comes in handy when we want to have both French, Italian, German, Spanish and English in our EU store and Japanese Chinese in our Asian store.
With this approach, we have 4 Multisite instances running, with a total of 9 sites running within these multisite instances.
However, this approach can give you problems with existing plugins from the WordPress plugins directory, as methods such as switch_to_blog don’t work flawlessly when multiple Multisite installations exist. In this setup, however, there is the possibility to make very customised functionality for each market.
The architecture is highly dependent on support systems
If we are going to use WooCommerce as our ecommerce platform, we want to utilise the best parts of WordPress and WooCommerce to work with us rather than against us. For example, as mentioned earlier, there are several ways to implement languages, but there are few ways to do it in a scalable way.
However, when scaling our WooCommerce ecommerce like this, we need to understand that it will create a lot of manual work if we don’t have support systems as WooCommerce has some limitations “out of the box”.
- No way to manage all orders from one interface
- No way to manage all coupons from one interface
- Synchronisation of product information is not super easy
- Images have to be managed from site to site, creating large amounts of images.
- No way to automagically synchronise stocks (Can be solved with WooCommerce Stock Syncronization)
- Only one stock per installation possible (Can be solved with WooCommerce Stock Syncronisation)
ERP, PIM, WMS, etc.
Because of these limitations in WooCommerce, we need to understand which support systems we want to use to make the work easy and scalable if we want to avoid lots of manual work. If we can get the right support systems in place early on, we will find it much easier as our business scales up.
To solve these problems, we usually need an ERP system and a PIM system. Different systems have different functions, but the basic ERP system at least handles orders. If the ERP does not handle item and stock management, you will need to get a WMS system. A standard PIM system can provide all images, translations and discount codes in one central place, and this will save you a lot of time. Read more about this in this article on ERP for WooCommerce.
Alternative solutions; Multiple installations
Now that we’ve learnt how to build a proper architecture for our Ecommerce solution using Multisite, it’s worth mentioning that if you have an existing installation with ERP and other support systems, you might as well use individual installations of WordPress instead of a Multisite set-up. This can even lead to easier maintenance for each installation, as we have fewer things that can break. Then it’s about having a good development process that makes it easy for the team working on it to ship off changes.
This can be a good approach for already large companies with ready-made support systems that want to try new ideas with WooCommerce. Starting and finishing a WooCommerce project is almost always much faster than using competing software, which means larger companies can try new business vectors with WooCommerce with a very short time to market.
Good luck scaling your future multi-market & multilingual WooCommerce store!