Selling online in multiple countries​

Nowadays it is very common for an ecommerce to sell in multiple countries. For leading brands, this level of personalization is critical, whereby the customer experience and site features are tailored to the local law and culture.

The need for greater personalization with multiple country sites​

Some ecommerce sites consist of a single international store, where the only level of personalization offered is the option to change the currency and language. There are however the other (and more common) cases, where there are several stores within the same umbrella (with distinct url slugs) representing different markets. These different market stores provide a higher level of personalization, such as:

1. application of national or regional laws
2. respective tax and jurisdiction configuration
3. payment methods available to that market
4. warehouses and shipping options
5. customized catalog
6. Market-specific campaigns
7. Time zone-specific promotion periods The list goes on. At the end, each market can have a very personalized experience that is different from the other markets for that ecommerce.

Do you have full control of the visual UI experience for the different markets?​

With a powerful ecommerce platform, it would be easy to create a new country site, for example personalizing the catalog, assigning specific warehouses, personalizing marketing content, differentating the price rules & promotions, and even create new payment methods specific to that market. The problem comes from not having a full control of the changes that are happening for the different markets on a daily basis. Sometimes businesses struggle to manage these changes because they are constantly just checking to make sure that everything is fine on production site instances.

How can Valido help?​

With Valido, you can define a different/personalized validation flow for each country site UI, or re-use the same one if you expect the same visual customer experience across all the sites. Valido provides you complete control of the visual testing of the different countries, eliminating the effort of manually checking every single page for countless of hours.

Valido’s Session Review allows to test your ecommerce flows for multiple country sites and check the results instantly:

The test configuration can be shared and applied for multiple countries just with one click:

The Valido Dashboard’s map will instantly review the validation status of each country.

And of course the data can be filtered accordingly based on the already configured countries / region:

What is a viewport of an ecommerce?​

A viewport is the screen area of a specific ecommerce webpage, visualized by the browser, which is visible to the user.

Is it important to take the viewport into consideration when testing / validating the UI/UX of an ecommerce store?​

Yes, of course! The viewport reflects the real user experience, meaning his experience is shaped through the lens of the viewport, whether a seamless experience or one that is filled with UI errors / unexpected behaviors.

What about the content outside the user’s viewport?​

They should be of concern too! Validating just the viewport can be an underestimation of the user experience, and should be part of proper ecommerce testing and validation. Valido, unlike most visual testing platforms, allows the validation of UI elements outside the current viewport.

Do you have any example?​

Let´s take the checkout. Especially modern checkout focus the attention on the Let's take a look at the checkout process. Modern ecommerce checkouts in particular tend to put focus on the mobile experience. However, despite the likelihood of being optimized and fully responsive, it is almost impossible to show all the important information on relatively tiny screen sizes that mobile devices come with. Hence, it is very common for them to have a scroll or other navigation features, to allow users to view the checkout information in its entirety.

1. cart items with prices
2. shipping options
3. payment options
4. and so on ... Focusing on just the user’s viewport at a particular point of time, prevents the testing and validation of the entire page and all the steps (most important one being the payment options).

How does Valido fill this need?​

Valido is able to perform full-page validations by scrolling the entire page, and not just the current viewport. This unique feature of Valido guarantees a proper and complete validation of pages associated with an ecommerce.

Here’s an example of a full-page validation for a desktop site.

As you can see, the visual differences detected are not just of the viewport (the content visible to the user at a particular time) but are for the whole page.