This sponsored post comes to you from Drupal Association Technology Supporter and DrupalCon Amsterdam Sponsor, Lingotek. Lingotek offers cloud-based website localization solutions that simplify the process of creating and maintaining Drupal global websites. This post was written by Calvin Scharffs, VP of Marketing and Product Development at Lingotek.

Taking your e-commerce site global sounds like it should be easy, but it’s not: in reality, there are countless little details involved. If you miss one, it can make life difficult. Let’s say a large customer in Japan wants to buy $10,000 worth of widgets, but your site doesn’t support the Yen. Or, your product descriptions have to be translated one-by-one, because you didn’t put text in the image.

You can avoid the morass of problems these challenges present—and needless extra work—by making sure you fulfill these three priorities.

Use modules that were designed to be multilingual. Modules designed to be multilingual will store your images and file types in a certain way so that when the time comes, you’ll translate seamlessly. If some of your strings aren’t designed to be multilingual, figure out in advance what to do about that. (Drupal, due to its standout community-generated modules, is excellent at handling multilingual websites.)

Don’t put text on your images. Avoid placing product names and descriptions in images, so that you don’t get stuck with English text on an image that appears on a website in another country.

Build in support for different currencies. Make sure that your website will both convert costs accurately and display the right currency. Have support for international dates and currencies before you go global.

These three things alone will save you a lot of work—and error. That, in turn, will leave you more time to do things you like to do, and less time tracking down problems that you could have avoided up-front. Want to learn more about getting your e-commerce site ready for the world? Come to our session at DrupalCon Amsterdam on Multilingual Site Setup & Management.

Image courtesy of Kenneth Lu on Flickr.