Hi,

We are a UK based online reseller of computer media and duplication products. I had a conversation today with a company trying to sell me translation services to other european languages.

What the guy advised was to buy the domain names for the other counties like .fr for france and .es for spain etc.. and then set up landing pages in the target language and host these pages in their respective countries. Most ecommerce in europe is transacted in english so the company that contacted me gave further advice to then link these foreign domains to my .com - i.e. my main site and let the people buy from there.

Does anyone have experience of doing this? We already do a fair amount of trade into these counties but we are only coming up under the .com so it is suggested that having a foriegn landing page and domain will add too this traffic. Is it worth doing or are there any disadvantages?

All help and suggestions will be most appreciated.

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http://www.dvd-and-media.com/ Largest suppliers of DVD cases in the UK
http://www.talkangling.co.uk/ Busiest fishing tackle and angling chat site in the UK

It can help you in many ways:
- Even google has a different domain name for every country. The user that came from france to the .com domain is automatically redirected to the french domain, this is usefull because your homepage will be allways in the home language of the user unless he deceided to change it.
- In terms of traffic, you will see an increase, mainly caused by two reasons:

Hi,

One of our two language services is translation, and what I've seen is - yes in terms of traffic, not so much in terms of the business.

Even we have a couple of country specific tld mini-sites; visitors like the local feel and they always do better in that country's G than out international site. But,

if the visitor lands on a .fr and then sends you an email he's going to be expecting you to reply in French, if he calls, he's going to want a French number, expecting you have a French office, and someone speaking French. Unless you have an extremely commoditised product or service, can you handle the customer relationship in those languages?

We have multilingual staff but an international telephone number, emails are fine, but our conversion ratio overall including email, online and telephone orders from local TLDs is well under half that of our international site.

Take care,
Alex

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Alex TJ
Corsi di inglese per aziende - Milano
Servizi di Traduzione Professionale