Building for International Sales  ## Metadata - Author: [[WP Product Talk]] - Full Title: Building for International Sales - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #international_sales - #translation_management - #tax_compliance Author: WP Product Talk Podcast Hosts Source: WP Product Talk Podcast Reference: YouTube: Building for International Sales (Translations, Taxes, Privacy, and more!) date created: 2025-07-11 12:00 --- # Title: Building for International Sales (Translations, Taxes, Privacy, and more!) ## Table of Contents: - [📝 Summary](#📝-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#📖-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#🗒️-notes) - [📖 References](#📖-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#🗣️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#📰-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#✅-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#🧪-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#📊-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#❓-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#🔮-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#💡-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#🧠-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#📊-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#🌍-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical validity](#✅-logical-validity) - [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#🔍-darvo-analysis) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#🔍-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#🎯-conclusion) ### References: - Building for International Sales (Translations, Taxes, Privacy, and more!) | WP Product Talk Podcast ## 📝 Summary: Hosts Katy Keith and Zach Katz interview Steve Jones (Equalized Digital) on selling WordPress products globally. They cover translation workflows (volunteer vs AI), CI automation for localization, currency display, region-specific pricing, VAT compliance, multilingual support, cultural design cues, and accessibility under ADA and the EU Accessibility Act. ## 📖 Main Content: Digital goods avoid shipping complexity but still require: - **Translations**: Volunteer-driven glotpress vs AI tools (PTC by WPML) for plugin strings. - **Automation**: GitHub Actions run WP-CLI makepot → PTC translations → auto-merge PO/MO/JSON files. - **Website Localization**: Debated impact on SEO; browser auto-translate vs true site translation. - **Currency & Pricing**: Multicurrency display; targeted pricing in India tripled volume at proportional price. - **Tax Compliance**: EU VAT registration for B2C/B2B, thresholds; merchant-of-record solutions (Fremius, Paddle) for hassle-free VAT/refunds. - **Support**: Use Google Translate for non-English tickets; propose AI-driven auto-translation fields. - **Cultural Sensitivity**: Color symbolism (red warns in West vs prosperity in China) and UI design adjustments. - **Accessibility**: Plugins must comply with ADA, Section 508, and EU Accessibility Act to reach all users. ### 🗒️ Notes - **0:02–0:14**: Digital products simplify logistics but need localization. - **1:13–1:38**: Steve Jones intro; focus on accessibility. - **3:37–5:10**: WordPress.org translation status (German 78%, Dutch 42%). - **6:57–8:08**: AI translation trial via ptc.wpml.org; native speaker validation. - **9:37–11:02**: CI workflow automates makepot and translation merges. - **13:25–15:00**: Website translation vs browser auto-translate; currency UX importance. - **22:37–24:04**: India pricing experiment: one-third price → triple sales → equal revenue. - **28:41–30:10**: EU VAT rules: B2C/B2B compliance, VAT number, regional rates. - **32:37–34:26**: Merchant-of-record trade-offs: support offload vs customer ownership. - **34:26–36:00**: Google Translate for support; idea for AI auto-translation. - **40:08–41:08**: Cultural design: red CTA implications across markets. - **43:12–45:08**: Accessibility law triggers: ADA, Section 508, EU Act thresholds. - **47:03–50:44**: Final advice: integrate localization, tax, accessibility from the start. ## 📖 References: - Transcript: YouTube (Building for International Sales) - PTC by WPML: ptc.wpml.org - WP-CLI MakePot: developer.wordpress.org/cli/commands/i18n/make-pot/ ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1. **Original (0:02–0:14)**: > "One thing I love about selling software online is that your business is automatically international..." **Paraphrased**: > Digital products remove shipping hurdles but demand attention to language, jurisdictional laws, and cultural norms to truly serve a global audience. 2. **Original (22:37–23:01)**: > "We did an experiment... we set a manual price that was much lower for India and saw how that went..." **Paraphrased**: > By offering reduced pricing in India, sales tripled—and because revenue scaled proportionally, net profit remained constant, validating targeted regional pricing. ## 📰 Newsletter: Hey WordPress champions! In this issue: - **Learn**: Explore our GitHub Actions + WP-CLI guide to automate plugin localization—no more manual makepot hassles! ⏩ [Get started](https://example.com/ci-i18n) - **Core Update**: WP 6.4 ships improved REST schemas and editor UX tweaks—our breakdown has all the details. 🔗 [Read more](https://wordpress.org/news/) - **Community Spotlight**: Shoutout to @global_dev for leading multilingual support forums! - **Plugin Pick**: **GlobalPrice**—show multicurrency pricing and auto-translate checkout labels instantly. 🚀 [Install](https://wordpress.org/plugins/globalprice) Stay inclusive, stay accessible, and keep building for every corner of the globe! ## ✅ Action Items: Prompt for aligning insights with your DevRel mission: > “Analyze the WP Product Talk episode ‘Building for International Sales’ focusing on translation strategies, tax and VAT compliance, support localization, cultural design, and accessibility. Highlight how each insight maps to open-source advocacy, contributor onboarding, educational outreach, and my goal of OSPO leadership—emphasizing transparency and inclusivity in WordPress.” ## 🧪 Hypotheses: 1. AI-automated translations cut volunteer translator load by 50% while preserving ≥90% string accuracy. 2. Country-specific pricing increases conversions in emerging markets without reducing overall profit. 3. Merchant-of-record solutions reduce small-shop VAT errors by 80% vs direct sales. ### 📊 Methodology: - **Translation Accuracy**: A/B test human vs AI-generated strings with native speakers. - **Pricing Experiment**: Deploy region-targeted pricing in two markets; measure conversion, revenue, support ticket volume. - **Tax Compliance Audit**: Compare VAT filing error rates and staff time before/after merchant-of-record migration. ### ❓ Questions: - How do end users rate AI translations vs volunteer-edited ones? - What’s the SEO ROI of translating landing pages vs focusing on landing-page quality? - Can merchant-of-record models scale for niche WordPress plugin vendors? ### 🔮 Future Research: - Study impact of culturally localized UI (colors, imagery) on global conversion. - Evaluate AI-driven support ticket translation on satisfaction and resolution time. - Assess accessibility compliance’s effect on churn in regulated markets. ### 💡 Implications: - **Practice**: CI-driven localization shortens release cycles for global audiences. - **Policy**: OSPO frameworks should embed localization and accessibility checklists. - **Community**: Inclusive translation workflows expand participation in open-source projects. ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: - **Visual**: Transcript lacks diagrams—add flowcharts of CI-localization pipeline. - **Aural**: Podcast suits auditory learners; offer a standalone audio summary. - **Verbal**: Strong examples; include more storytelling analogies. - **Kinesthetic**: Suggest hands-on labs for setting up GitHub Actions for i18n. - **Logical**: Clear stepwise workflows; decision trees for tool selection. - **Social**: Host collaborative localization workshops. - **Solitary**: Insert journaling prompts on personal localization challenges. - **Naturalistic**: Use environment metaphors (e.g., “gardening” plugin translations). ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment: - **Screen Reader**: Provide alt text for any embedded visuals in show notes. - **Keyboard**: Ensure CI demos and dashboards are keyboard-navigable. - **Contrast**: Use high-contrast palettes in localization interfaces. - Summary: Selling digital products online may seem “borderless,” but the reality of international sales is anything but simple. From legal requirements to customer experience, WordPress product makers face a unique set of challenges when going global. In this episode of WP Product Talk, hosts Katie Keith (Barn2 Plugins) and Zack Katz (GravityKit) are joined by Steve Jones from Equalize Digital to unpack the key considerations when selling WordPress products internationally. We’ll dive into: ✅ The essentials: taxes, translations, privacy laws, accessibility, and more. ✅ Cross-border pricing, currency strategies, and why fluctuations matter right now. ✅ Region-specific support and marketing tactics that actually work. ✅ Practical insights from Steve’s real-world work and plugin experiences. Whether you’re already selling internationally or just starting to reach global markets, this episode is full of hard-earned lessons, tips, and must-know pitfalls for scaling your WordPress product business worldwide. WP Product Talk is a weekly podcast for WordPress product founders and marketers. Our rotating panel of experienced co-hosts includes: ⚡ Matt Cromwell, WP Product Talk founder, co-Founder of GiveWP, and Senior Director of Customer Experience at StellarWP ⚡ Katie Keith, Founder & CEO of Barn2 Plugins ⚡ Zack Katz, Founder of GravityKit ⚡ Amber Hinds, Founder & CEO at Equalize Digital Learn more at https://wpproducttalk.com. - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT1a0PnP7Ew One thing I love about selling software online is that your business is automatically international. You don't have to worry about shipping, customs tariffs, or any of the things that affect physical products and make them so complex. However, there are still some important things that you need to know about selling internationally. Let's talk about them. Now, this is WP product talk, the place where every week we bring you insights in product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go-to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress product owners. And now, enjoy the show. [Music] Hi, I'm Katy Keith, founder and CEO at Barnu. And I'm Zach Katz, founder and CEO of Gravity Kit. And today we're talking about selling products internationally. And that's why we have invited Steve Jones today. Uh Steve, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. Uh please introduce yourself. Yeah, well, thanks for having me, guys. Uh my name is Steve Jones. I'm the co-founder and CTO of Equalized Digital. We specialize in accessibility software uh uh services and training uh including the accessibility checker plugin which helps uh ensure websites meet WIKAG compliance. Uh I've been building and selling WordPress products for well over a decade and I've learned a lot about what it takes to serve uh clients not just here in the US but around the globe. Well, we're going to be looking forward to learning more about your uh your findings and sharing sharing our own. Um, so Steve, why is this an important topic for WordPress product owners? Well, I mean, it's a it's an important topic because, you know, uh, you know, from our perspective, you know, our company specializes in accessibility, right? And accessibility is all about being inclusive to everybody regardless of their abilities, right? And if you want to be inclusive in that regard, it's probably well fit to be inclusive in the regard of people that speak different languages or live in different reasons or h live under jurisdictions that have different laws and requirements. And um I think it's just the right thing to do if you create great software and you create something that adds value to make it uh accessible to as many people as possible. I think there's a business aspect to that as well too, right? If you put in the time, the effort, the money, the investment into uh creating software, um you want to reach a large as big of an audience as you can to maximize your returns on that software so that you can keep moving it along, keep generating it, and keep making it better for all of your users. Yeah, that's very true. And yeah, it affects it's good for business, but also it's just the right thing to do, the legal thing to do in many cases. Um, but there's a lot of different threads to it. So, let's start by going into our show and tell section uh where we talk about some of our work that we've each done to do with internationalizing our business. Um, do you want to go first, Steve, because I know you've done some amazing work recently on the translation side of things. Sure. Sure. Totally. Yeah. So, we have recently uh uh we we sponsored uh Word Camp Europe and we sent uh Amber and Chris, our CEO and CTO uh down there to uh represent us and and this was part of our our push to help support the European Accessibility Act. And at the same time, we kind of had some discussion back and forth internally with us owners about, you know, uh is the plug-in ready for full translations? Is it should we translate it all? Now there's recently been a lot of developments in AI translations. Are those is it ethical to use AI translations? Right? You have all these questions about it. So there's the techno aspect of it and it's kind of the ethical aspect of it. and uh and we kind of came to the determination that hey let's spend a couple days like uh seeing if we could implement this and those couple days turned into three weeks but because accessibility checker is a suite of plugins at this this point it's five uh separate plugins and uh there's a free plugin that actually is uh distributed through WordPress.org or and then we have uh a pro plugin and three add-ons that are distributed ourselves and we use EDDD and uh there's different methods that you would take to translate uh those different plugins in those different areas. So we we have uh we have had a little bit of translation work and a little bit of contribut uh contributions from from the polyglot team to uh translate like German. We had that like 90% and um and 90% translated and then a few other I have a screen. we can pull up my my screen here and I can do the the show part of my show and tell and I'll try to describe what I'm showing as we go along. All right, let's take a look. Okay, so so like I mentioned um when you when you distribute your your free plugin through WordPress.org there there is uh what's called glotress uh I'm I'm showing the translate.wordpress.org org um website for our accessibility checker plugin and you can see uh what's been translated on the screen. I'm showing German at like 78% uh translated and Dutch at 42% translated and Spanish at 14 and then it goes down a few few languages. Um the interesting thing once you hit a certain threshold it will actually initiate the translation on your WordPress.org org pl uh page. I'm looking at wordpress.org/pluginsacessibility-checker. So here you can see we have uh five languages. Uh and you can see that like once you hit a certain threshold then it pops up here. So you're kind of reliant on uh translation contributors uh translating your strings for you which is volunteer labor that has its own um ex its own ethical implications and uh and in and we've had such trouble with this as well in the past where you just rely on people every eight months they might have a spurt of translations but then whenever as a developer I add a translatable string I feel bad because I know that somebody's going to have to translate this and if it's more verbose than it needs to be or if it has some complex structure that has like placeholders that get replaced The more complex the string, the worse I would feel about adding new strings. So, I would leave old badly transl like badly written labels with capitalization that was inconsistent because I didn't want to burden the translator, right? And that is absurd. So, uh that's one. We've also switched to AI translations and I feel no shame or guilt about adding wonderful, beautiful language to my plugins now. So, do you have any evidence as to the quality of AI translations? Yeah. So, so uh I'll answer that, but let me speak to what Zach said. Yes. So, our our our German was actually 90% and then we actually made some changes with the way that our JavaScript compiles. We actually fixed uh uh some of the translations that were actually being dropped in the compile phase and it dropped us from 90% down to 78%. So there's now more strings in there and and the and the transl the translation contributors actually I think has reduced the team has even reduced since co so it's it's very hard to get this translated into all the languages that you need. So, so to your point, uh what you to your question, Katie, um we decided to go with this PTC. This was a recommendation that uh our CEO Amber Hines got and she sent it over to me and to take a look and to see if we can implement this. So, uh I'm on ptc.wpml.org and their catchphrase says their AI powered translation software. I think it's somewhere maybe they removed it. It says better than human translations every time, right? So, it's like I can't fully validate whether or not these are actually better than human and I really don't know what that means, but like it's a good tagline. Um, so what we did was we we kind of did a test. We we rolled this up a little bit and we ran our our our our pot file, which is the file that holds all your translation strings through here. And then we kind of put together a a build for Amber while she was in Europe. She grabbed a few people and said, "Hey, you know, you speak Dutch, you know, you speak German. Can you can you validate this? How does this look?" And and and the feedback that she got was it it looks pretty good. Um sure, there may be a few things here and there that can change. Um but the feedback was good. We are a past guest, Jack Arturo. uh ran a tool that I my team created called Podmatic and I'll be talking about this after after this uh and their feedback was they had a a German uh customer review it in depth and there was one issue that was some a a word that should have been added to a dictionary which you can do you can define a dictionary term that should like let it know that this means this. So when you say slug you don't mean the slimy creature that crawls over your garden. you mean uh the URL endp point. Uh so you can add dictionary terms like that and improve and refine. So when people who use your software say hey this string is improperly translated you can fix that and will be fixed forever as you go forward. So um it learns as AI is want to do uh what you know how to better translate your software as you go. Yeah totally. And we we even got feedback like the word like get accessibility checker like it I think that's what it was like in in like maybe in Dutch it like means get it for free you know and that's not exactly what we're saying. Um but uh so I can walk you through a little bit too about that. Uh so the way that this ptcwpml.org works is you actually set it to watch uh a GitHub branch. So, we set it to watch our develop branch and um anytime that we push up a pot file with with change strings inside of it, it will actually autogenerate uh all the uh MO and PO files, which are your translation files. Um and in up to 32 different languages. And and the interesting thing about it too is that in the in the dashboard for this this application, you actually you actually can edit this and and and manage it just like you would on polyglot on WordPress.org where uh I'm showing the admin and you can see the all my strings in English and then you can see a column like almost like a spreadsheet um where you can edit the languages in every language. So if there is a translation that somebody comes back to us and says hey this says get accessibility checker but it's pro and you're going to charge me but in my language git means you're like giving it to me for free. We could actually go in here for that particular language and we can edit it to a phrase that they provide to us and and have confirmed that this is a better string to use and any and it'll actually override that with what's with what's in our pot file. So it if we push up a new pot file with that same string, it'll actually pull from from what we've edited here. And from a development standpoint, uh, you can also, just FYI for those listening who don't know this, when you translate a string in WordPress, you can also provide context. So when you say get accessibility checker, you can also add a context string to it that says when I say get, I mean purchase. Yeah. And then that can be that will be read by and processed by PTC and Pmatic and other automated translations. And also for the translators that don't know that get accessibility checker means purchase. Yeah. Yeah. So, so this was kind of a great tool for that. And we even ran into too where we we in our plug-in you want to be making sure that your plugin or your theme that you're selling is translatable. I kind of skipped over that a little bit, but making sure you're using translation functions that wrap your strings. Um and when we went through that process of we've been doing that over many years making sure that's why this process was a little easy because most of our strings were already translatable and um and we were a were able to ensure that through our own linting and our own CI processes and quite frankly if you use an AI a AI um uh code reviews such as code rabbit or you know Gemini code reviews Those will a lot of times will catch untransated strings as well. We kind of translated too many strings. So uh we translated our own product names and u the nice thing about PTC is that uh it has a glossery where you can actually put in uh you know uh like for like accessibility checker we don't want to translate that. So in all languages it's going to be accessibility checker and we can just manage that from here. We don't have to untransate the string inside of all the plugins and with with every pull we can know that those branded phrases are always going to be branded. And for those uh strings that shouldn't be translated as well. Uh one thing that we found is you want to add short codes to the glossery. If you have short codes, you do not want the short codes to be translated if they include translatable words. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great point. So, for us, uh, as a as a development team, we we've learned that, uh, if we don't automate it, we're going to have a hard time following it and keeping up with it. So, we had to build this into our our continuous integration to ensure that we keep up with it, that my developers keep up with it, and any new developers that come on the team or anybody that contributes to our our free plugin because it's a public repo that anybody can submit PRs to. We had to build this into our CI. And um I'll just kind of run through this real quick because it gets highly technical, but uh basically what we've done is we created a a workflow inside of GitHub. I'm I'm looking at github.com right now and I'm looking at the accessibility checker repo and I' I've pulled up a uh a GitHub workflow. It's it's my developer named it make pot. I think he's being funny here, but uh this is a workflow that generates a pot file. So, you can use the WordPress CLI in your command line to to generate a pot file from all of your translatable strings. Well, we don't want to we don't want to have to manually do that every time. So, once you push up to a uh to the develop branch, it's watching this workflow will run it. It essentially it essentially rolls up WordPress install and runs the the proper WP CLI commands to generate the the pot file and the JSON uh the JSON file. So amo or APO file which is generated by PTC for us off of the pot file. Those are actually the files with the translatable strings in them. the the the PO is a human readable one and the mo is a machine file that's not human readable and you could actually just distribute the uh mo file and then and those work for PHP for JavaScript you got to you use uh JSON files for your translation strings so this will generate the the pot file it goes to PTC PTC PTC watches that branch it creates the translations it pushes those translations back to GitHub for us as a PR to that initial PR and then we can just merge it in and it'll actually generate the uh JSON strings. We ran into some issues with PTC and JSON. We chose to to do the JSON the WordPress way and I think that PTC does some sort of chunking of the JSON strings and we were we weren't able to really get that to work for the way we have things set up. So we actually will generate those ourselves with this same this same workflow after we get the translations back. And so you can see the the first PR here. This is our workflow. It runs. Uh I'm looking at a a new PR here. It's called upate update transition files. So if I up like like Zach said, he updates a string. He doesn't have we don't have to have a heart attack because we we updated a string. Um this will actually just identify it. It it it will update the pot file. PTC will see this. It'll it'll it'll now PTC I've switched over to a new PR where PTC has opened. And you can see I have 100 files in here because these these are all the translations files here. So we we have these we've got all our translations. This is all done automatically. And it's going to be done in CI so no developer can actually bypass this. And um this ensures that strings are all translated moving forward. Nice. And we will make sure to add these URLs that you're showing to the show notes so that people if they're listening or watching and they want to look more at what the YAML file for makepot uh looks like uh you can check out our show notes at wprotalk.com for this episode. Yeah. Good plan. So that is translating the actual plugins. But what about translating the information that lead people to buy our plugins? So every time I go to a word camp, I meet somebody from either weot or translate press and they convince me that it's an amazing idea to translate our website. And I can never decide because I I live in Spain and it is very easy as a user for me to rightclick or whatever and translate in the browser. It's not a barrier for me if the website is Spanish only and not translated into English. Um, but what these translation plug-in people are telling me is that it's a massive SEO opportunity because if people are typing um, for example, in Spanish, they might be typing product table for Woo Commerce in Spanish and my plug-in is called Woo Commerce product table and not the translated version. So, I'm not going to rank for a Spanish language search term, or at least not as well, than if I actually translated my website into Spanish. And so, apparently, we could improve our ranking significantly by translating our website. So, I'm currently in the early stages of planning a project to try all that for maybe a couple of languages, not our whole site, but our product pages and the entire purchase flow, so the checkout and everything. and and just to see and then we will measure do we actually rank more highly. I'd love to know do either of you translate your websites? Have you got any evidence that is it worth doing for either the user or for the SEO? So, I was just reviewing a product page for a friend in WordPress that they were putting together for a course and they asked me what they thought or what I thought and uh it looked great. It was it looked like a really good um product. Uh, I was sold and then I got down to the bottom and it said a €219 euros. I was like, "What the hell? I don't know what euros are." Uh, I know they're less than they used to be compared to the US dollar or the US dollar is worse. It's they're more than that's the it made me think. And the goal with websites is don't make me think. Uh, and so I don't I agree, Katie, that many international users have Google Translate built into their browser or like similar thing where like they come to a website, it's automatically translated. I don't think that we're losing sales other than the SEO opportunities because of translation. I do think that we are probably losing sales due to uh not showing prices in their native um uh currency, but also not having international pricing. And I got um I want I I hope to that we can talk about this. I know we've talked about it a little bit in the past on WP product talk, but uh I had somebody reach out to me from India and say, "Listen, uh your products are amazing and uh they're really expensive here in India. What can you do?" And I'm a startup. I don't have many, you know, much funds. I want So I'd love to talk about international pricing as well as currency display. Yeah, they're both relevant and I do have experience of both of those. So, we sell in seven currencies uh based on the areas that the majority of our customers are. When we first introduced that, I didn't actually measure an increase in conversion rates and I did check um but once you've done it, it's very hard to go back. So, we've just kept it. But I don't have any numbers to say to you that's going to improve your conversion rates. Um and we have also tried c country specific pricing specifically for India for the reason that you mentioned. We noticed in our analytics that a huge proportion of our visitors were from India but a tiny proportion of our sales were and that may well be because of the price barrier. So we did an experiment where because we were already using a multicurrency plug-in, we were able to set different um prices per country quite easily. So we set a manual price that was much lower for India and saw how that went. And when we measured it over about six months, we found that we vastly increased the number of sales from India, but that was the exact same proportion as the price that we had dropped it. So if we if it was a third of the price then we tripled it if that makes sense. Then we tripled the number. Therefore profit was the same. Anything you do that adds complexity has to have a clear benefit. So we no longer offer cheaper prices for any country. But we do set the currency pricing um based on some clever rules and things. It's not just an automatic translation. So there is that. What do you do Steve? Yeah, we don't we don't we just have standard, you know, like you said, we keep we try to keep things as simple as possible for a small team trying to make a big impact. Um, so we don't do any uh, you know, multicurrency pricing in that regard. And and um, back to the and the question about like translations, you know, on your website for your marketing pages, we don't currently do that either. uh you know like you said you can use you can trans the browser can translate those pages for people but you know things can get lost in translation. Um, it's interesting. Uh, it'd be an interesting experiment to to maybe pick a language like we've had a lot of movement in in German for some reason and um, you know, maybe that would be a good experiment to try to translate that to p that those marketing pages to see if there is any net SEO benefit. Um, I can see that Amber said in the comments that Taco said that they did this at Yoast and that there was no trackable benefit to it. So, it's definitely interesting. Yeah, Amber's comment is I talked to Taco about this and he said they did this at Yos and saw no benefit or trackable increase in sales. Yeah. And if they and that's worrying actually are far bigger than us. They would have much better data. So, that's very interesting. Well, and that's the thing. I you know the I don't know if it's u a bias that the our sales numbers versus our visit numbers uh show that our best sales are in uh US uh Canada, England, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, kind of in that order. Um same. Yeah. And I I'm looking at greater Asia including India and thinking there are you know billions of people using hundreds of millions of websites surely there are customers there uh and I've tried to target them in the past and I um using paperclick uh specifically and the the cost of acquiring a customer there is very high relative to the cost the the revenue that we get from it and if we cut our costs or if we cut the pricing, the margin goes down. We're not able to provide the same level of support. I do wonder though if the answer for those areas might be an introduction to our services because I know that a lot of people are using GPL Vault like other GPL site services where they pay of they pay much less and they get the software that's pirated or whatever. Instead of doing that, we could offer a no support download license where there's an expectation that yes, you get the software, you can use our docs, you are not able to contact support without paying a higher amount. And that way we protect our margins and uh they're able to, you know, get get access to our wonderful tools uh without breaking their own bank. Yeah. And we had a little bit when we were going through the discussion on the translations on whether we should kind of push forward with that. Um, and we kind of we experienced the same thing, right? We don't we don't do a lot in Asia, but we do a lot in Europe and the United States and and uh and you know, my lead developer on the plugin, you know, he's from Europe and and and he had a lot of feedback about this. And and the the thing about Europeans is we get the benefit and and and the reward of Europeans really knowing English as a second language and being a lot of times being taught it in uh in or fifth, you know. Yeah. four fifth place. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's like uh you know, they're buying the product now because they can actually read the English translates the the English language. So, it was kind of like, you know, do we really translate it to, you know, German and all these languages because they actually speak English, too. And I don't know if if that's why we can we can sell so easily to to Europe without a lot of effort. And maybe that's the disconnect, you know, when you go over to Asia is that really they don't have English as a a second language. And I think the web developers pretty much all do though, don't they? The Indian web developers have amazing English. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The language barrier in India isn't so much an issue. Uh I they also speak English as a first or second language I believe. Um and but it's uh you know the amount of funds that are available to purchase and that I think is a vicious cycle as well. If they don't have access to tools where they can increase their their own sales, how can they pay for ours? Yeah, definitely an issue. Um so another thing that we haven't covered yet is the tax side of things. uh which is I know a big worry for a lot of people when they start selling WordPress products particularly people that have maybe previously sold on a marketplace or something that did that for them. I know um a lot of people for example have previously sold on the Invato marketplaces and then suddenly don't anymore because of things that have happened over there and they're like what do I do with tax? I just know it's one of the bigger pain points. And the thing a lot of people don't realize, particularly Americans, is that if you sell digital products to customers in Europe, you actually have to sort out the European tax. It doesn't matter where your business is based. It's about where the customer is based. And all software, all theme and plug-in companies sell to customers in Europe. So that means that you have to register for European tax and UK tax because that's no longer in the EU. And you have to let them enter a VAT number on the checkout and reverse charge that if they've got one. If not, then you charge them, say, the German VAT if they're in Germany and don't have a VAT number and then you have to pay that over to the centralized European tax service. It's a nightmare. I do not agree with the law, but that is the law and all plug-in and theme companies should be actually meeting that. And I would say the easiest way to do that is to use something like Fremas or Paddle to sell your theme or plugins rather than doing it on your own website directly because they'll do it for you. That means that they're the merchant of record and not you. So, they're responsible. Um, but lots don't. We use easy digital downloads and it was such a problem that we've actually got a plug-in for this ed um which loads of plug-in companies use because it's like the only way and ed don't even make it possible. Same with Woo. If you're selling on Woo, you need to use a plug-in to sort all this out and it's not part of core. So, um do either of you um do anything with European VA? I know a lot of uh plug-in companies don't. I would be uh hounded by VVA uh great if I did not say you know Fremius is the probably easiest and best way to do this. Um having a merchant record has so many benefits. Uh but it also in my mind has some drawbacks where you don't necessarily own the customer relationship they do. Um, Fremius, they have a um, for those who are wondering, they have they they say that they are willing and able to transfer your customers out. So, like if if you don't want to stay with them, you can transfer it to your own Stripe account, which is good. Um, the merchant of record h has other benefits, including that they uh they handle some refund customer support if you want them to in paddle specifically. I've I've spoken with them about this where they can handle all refund requests uh and you don't have to be involved at all which is also scary to me as somebody who wants to control the customer experience. Yeah, I wouldn't want that. We wouldn't want that rescue then. But billing and and and pricing, you know, billing questions and refunds are a large portion of any plug-in company's support load. So that would free up our support team to do, you know, to spend more time on non-billing issues. So there are some upsides and downsides. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And uh I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but like the VAT it it's different for, you know, B TOC and B2B, right? Like do you Yeah, but you still need to do it. So B2B, you have to be able to prove they're a business by entering their VAT number and then that reverse charges the tax and then you have to give them a certain type of invoice as evidence. So you have to comply either way even if your customers are businesses. It's really annoying. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean I know in the United States there's, you know, there's actually certain states state it's on a state-by-state basis have certain uh tax regulations about charging tax on digital products. And uh but in the United States a lot of times it's it's there's a threshold, right? There's it's either a 500 or most states are like a 500,000 threshold and some are like a $100,000 threshold. So that's definitely something on our side uh for the United States that we're we definitely monitor those buckets a little bit to see if there's something at some point in time where we need to start charging that that that tax for for US customers. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I'd like to ask you all what you do for handling support uh in multiple languages. Like uh what what setups do you have? How do you um how do you have your customer support team manage uh people who are not natively English speakers? Yeah. So for us, we we don't have that support and we uh we I don't know that we've ever gotten a ticket in a language other than English. And uh we typically our support is pretty straightforward. We have, you know, somebody that runs first tier support and then if it's if it's an issue that can't be resolved there, then it gets escalated to the dev team, uh to one of our developers to to look at. Um, so we haven't really run into that issue too much. We do have native Spanish speakers on our team if if if somebody did contact us that speaks uh Spanish, but we have we luckily have not run into it uh so far. Yeah. So, we keep doing that. We're putting on the same comments at the same time. So, Ian says have Google Translate in another tab. Um I was about to say the same thing. So we do receive occasional support tickets in other languages. We just Google translate it. Our support is almost all email or live chatbased. So it's really easy to use an automatic translator. And so we try to reply in the customer's language. It doesn't matter that we can't check it. It's good enough. Yeah. I was thinking in advance of our talk today uh that we could make some optimizations to our own support flow where uh we could say in the description field for the what's going on just use your own language uh it's fine you know like cuz the implicit uh I I imagine implicitly people want to try to write it in English and that results in tickets that for non-English native speakers the quality of the tickets is terrible. uh if you've done customer support, you realize uh how much is lost in translation when somebody tries to say what's going on with their very specific website issue or plug-in issue. Um so I'm I'm thinking we add that uh and then maybe automatically have another field get translated after the plug after the um support ticket is submitted that translates it automatically using OpenAI. Um, you know, there's so many cool things you could do. uh use IP address to like the I I just love AI how it opens up the automation and the ability for for us to spend more time doing stuff like this that otherwise would have taken weeks or months to to implement where we can just say like let's have a two-day project uh Steve you know like you were saying let's let's have a sprint a little minor sprint and see what we can do and to improve our customers experience on this. No, that's great. And I think that's something we should all be looking at refining and and making better. And and like you said, even something as small as a just a a sentence that says, "Hey, we're we're being inclusive to people that speak different languages. We don't assume that you speak English, you know, speak to us in whatever you're comfortable with." That is it's great feedback. Yeah. The thing is what if everything else is in English, so they've had to navigate there in English and the form is in English. if you translate there's always going to be something that isn't your knowledge base and all of that. It's really hard to be fully consistent or maybe um like the emails as well that they receive after they buy the product. Yeah, sure they can translate it in the browser easily enough. Uh but it's very hard to be all-encompassing in your support for translations. Katie, why aren't we translating our emails? This this is easy. Like that's an easy win uh to have a a tab for our customers and I assume that these translation plugins have it uh like what language do you speak and then have uh have emails sent in their language. That would be so easy to do. Well, we're not even translating our websites yet though. Yeah, the emails I think are more important though. Like I don't know like does Apple Mail for example have built-in translations? Not that I'm aware of. But browsers do if people use Gmail but um yeah and you know Gmail and that's fine. Yeah. So we've got some comments from Ian again about what they do at Kestrel. He says we copied Zach with the AI translations in products and people have only complained once about a single word that was sort of imprecise. I think that's a good point. Humans also do make mistakes with translations and that's a good success rate, isn't it? And when humans break translations, it can cause fatal errors. Uh we have had um twice I think in our 10-year run for Gravity View. Um we've had human translated uh strings that missed a uh placeholder and if you only if you have a mismatch of the number of placeholders in the string that causes a fatal error and brings down a site. So, we distributed a translation that we didn't review because we just had people doing it volunteer basis. Uh, I think AI translations are going to be not only more precise, uh, but also less likely to break customers sites. Yeah, it's always improving. And Ian goes on to say, we disclose that we're translating support and then include the English after their language, too. Yeah, that's quite a nice way to do it. So I I think I've done that in the past although we don't have a policy where I might write Google translate colon and then the Italian and then the English. I suppose that covers you if you are concerned about it being inaccurate or something like that. Right. Well um I'm I'm excited about all the different things that we uh that we can talk we can implement after our conversation today. uh including I'm going to email some I'm going to translate some emails. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot to cover, isn't there? You It's really weird because we sell internationally. Anybody in the world can go on our websites and buy our products and yet there's all this stuff to think about even. So, so I did there is another aspect of international sales and and marketing and stuff that I think we should probably cover which is the aspect of color and color having different meanings. And an easy one to describe is red in you know English speaking languages is often associated with stop or bad or warning or danger and red in China and other uh you know Asian countries is often associated with prosperity and and uh good good luck. And so when you're translating a a page, it might have unintended side effects that uh where if you seem almost native uh in the language, but you have other cultural cues that don't aren't fully uh understood, it might have a mixed message that could result in issues. So just be aware of cultural sensitivity stuff, not just translating words. Hm. Should we be sending our designers on international color courses or something? Because you don't want a different color scheme for different cultures, but maybe if they could be aware and they could go for something that is appropriate for their call to action color and so on in all around the world. Yeah, call to action buttons I think especially um and then you you might as well take a screenshot of your landing page and send it to chat tpt and say, "Hey, what's there to fix here? Yeah, that would work. Like red buttons are a real no no in most of the worlds. Um, but that might really encourage people to buy in China. But then China is a whole another issue. We get almost no traffic, no sales from China. I've tried to do deals with people from China who approached me. They said, for example, that they would translate our blog posts into Chinese and publish them on their own website. Nothing. We've just never cracked China. Do you two have many sales in China? No. No. Taiwan. Uh we we Taiwan's up there in like top 25 countries. Yeah. That's not China. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that uh you know, sure we got tax and we got translations and stuff, but I think uh like since we got an accessibility guy here, I think that it I'd be remiss not to kind of lean in on that a little bit here and kind of say selling internationally or even, you know, local to the US. Accessibility is is a is a huge consideration. Um especially for selling, you know, website products, whether it be a theme or a plugin. In the United States, we have, you know, we have the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and we have section 508, um, laws which, you know, uh, require that entities that take on federal funds actually make their websites accessible. Uh, that they have to have a certain level of compliance with with WIKAG guidelines. And more recently, uh, just like last month, the European, uh, Accessibility Act went into effect. And, uh, this requires that European countries actually meet, uh, uh, and I think it's it goes way more it's way more broad than even the US where the US is limited to, you know, federal, you know, people that take on federal funds. Um uh I think this the European accessibility act extends to most businesses have to uh create you know accessible websites and there are thresholds sure like I think in the European accessibility act it's like 10 plus employees for your company $2 million in revenue or uh I think in Europe they call it turnover. Um, so if you're selling internationally, be it you're selling from Europe or you're selling from the US, I think that accessibility is a huge consideration for your product and in and giving that your customers that comfort um that you can say, "Hey, we've developed this plugin to be accessible and it and it will meet the European Accessibility Act or it will comply with the uh you know, the American with Disabilities Act." Yeah, we do get pre-sales inquiries about that. Are our plugins accessible to their local standard? Um, often we don't know. It's like a specific state in the US or something. So, we try to answer positively with what we do know um or what we would do if they found an issue or something. But, um, you do need to do what you can with that. Yeah. And uh Ian writes uh we added some milestone notices and a few plugins and tried to add personality phrases like hot dog or calabanga led to uh as as an emphasis led to very confusing translations. Yeah, I can see that. I mean hot dog definitely means multiple things, doesn't it? I mean give that dog some water or the food or whatever. But um it's interesting, isn't it? you tried to add personality, but actually that's very culturally specific. Often I often think about that with the language that I'm using. Um because I think would a non-native English speaker have been taught this word and often they wouldn't have done right and another idea that this episode has inspired in me is uh we have easy digital downloads populating our readmemes but our readme are in English. we do pass along to that request the trans the language that the site is using. So it would not it would not be hard for us to serve a different readme in different languages. Uh which would be a good thing to do. No, that's a I'm adding that to my to-do list. Okay. Well, I think we have covered many different aspects of the international side of things and there are a lot of aspects to consider. So, let's bring it together and move on to our best advice um on where to get started with this. So, what's the one piece of advice you'd give to somebody? So, do you want to go first, Steve? Sure. So, my advice would be to I'm always looking for maximum impact for minimum effort, right? And I think uh as far on the accessibility side, um there's a free plugin called accessibility checker that You could download that is interesting. How convenient. How convenient is extremely fullfeatured. Our full rule set is in there and you can start working on uh resolving and identifying accessibility issues on your websites like today. That's good advice. it actually to fix some of um but uh overall uh I would I would I would say like in accessibility we're always we're we're always stressing the importance of shifting left which is basically you know implementing accessibility from the start and and I think if you're if you're creating a a WordPress product these days you know we're we're in the we're in the times of AI being able to generate plugins super quick right but Uh, I would take steps and measures to think about your product as an international product and what can you implement now that's going to save you lots of time later. If you if you just start translating strings inside of your or making your strings translatable inside of your products, when it comes time to implement those translations, you're going to be so much further ahead of the ball. You don't want to get into a product where you have 10 20,000 lines of code and you realize, hey, we haven't translated any of these and and now you have to go back into a major refactor which can be very disruptive to your to your uh you know your release schedule and your product itself and and can introduce bugs. So just try to think of your product as an international product from the start. Think about privacy, think about accessibility, think about tax and think about translations. Yeah, my advice would be yeah, do what's proportionate to the scale and stage of your business. So, you should always meet legal requirements. Uh the simplest way you use accessibility checker for the accessibility um thinking about things like the VA that side of things. If you want to keep it simple, use something like Fremius. If you're using ED, then use my plugin. if we're doing shameless plugs like Steve did. Um, and but whatever you do, think of something that's right for the scale of your business. If you're just starting, you shouldn't be translating your website into every language, for example. You probably shouldn't be doing multicurrency. These are all things that you can do as your business grows. So, I'd say choose the level that's right for you now and keep assessing that in the future. Yeah. And for me, based on uh Taco at Yoast saying that it didn't really pay to try to um focus on different markets uh internationally, uh I would say don't. I think I think make sure that you're translatable. Make sure you follow international law. But yeah, I'm going to email him actually and get some more information. I was starting a project on that. So, I'm just writing. Yeah. And it's always a question. Is it worth it? And the answer apparently is no. I think a good landing page is a good landing page and and anything we can focus on for that would be great. And I do think perhaps loading in different stylesheets based on IP addresses makes sense and having different color schemes perhaps and like maybe even translating, but uh it seems like a lot more work than maybe is uh necessary to close that sale. So my my advice is uh don't don't worry about it as and focus on building and releasing accessible translatable plugins. Yeah, sounds good. Well, that's a wrap. Thank you, Steve, so much for joining us. Where can people find you online? Sure. Well, thanks for having me. Um, you can find me at equalizeddigital.com, uh, stevejones.blog, blog and pretty much everywhere else on the socials at Stevejonesed Dev. All right. Well, uh, next week our co-host Matt Cromwell and I will be chatting with Matt Bachelder about the infrastructure and tools of running a WordPress business. I love this topic. Uh, so put it in your calendar now. Don't miss it. Uh, it's going to be a good one. Yeah. And special thanks to Post Status for being our green room. If you're enjoying these shows, then do us a favor and click and hit like, subscribe, share it with your friends, put this show in your podcast and newsletters and mention it everywhere. And don't forget to tune in again next week. Bye. [Music], Building for International Sales, WP Product Talk, 01jzwy0ymnw03cxdbxyrkp0sfg.