Localization and the US Hispanic retail market

Zia Daniell Wigder | November 16, 2007, 11:23 AM

This week Best Buy rolled out a new Spanish-language transactional site targeted at the US Hispanic marketplace. The company previously offered a Spanish-language version of the site, but according to the release, the new site “allows Hispanic customers to browse, research, compare products, check out, and receive an order confirmation in their preferred language”.

Best Buy's Spanish-language site is a translated version of the original English-language site rather than a fully localized offering. The music link, for example, takes both English- and Spanish-speaking audiences to the same featured CDs. The same is true for DVDs. In both cases, the Spanish-language site gives the headlines of featured listings in Spanish, but leaves the product descriptions below in English.

By contrast, other retailers such as Amazon have taken a more aggressive approach to localization; the company offers a Spanish-language version of its books section for the US Hispanic market. Amazon offers unique content for this market and provides most links in Spanish. The search function defaults to Spanish-language books. Amazon has one of the more extensive localized offerings, however; Best Buy’s Spanish-language site puts it ahead of competitors such as Wal-Mart and Circuit City who do not (yet) offer sites targeted at the US Hispanic marketplace.

For Best Buy, a next step in localization offering is likely to be identifying specific content for the US Hispanic market; additional localization should also take into consideration user behavior. For example, Best Buy could highlight their cell phones and digital music offerings prominently, as our research shows that Hispanics strongly overindex on purchases of these two categories online.

With online retail spending by Hispanics in the US topping $20 billion by 2011, look to see an increasing number of retailers eyeing not only translations, but also increasing localization for this market.