Bablic Success Story:
Localize E-commerce Website -
Green Man Gaming

Goals

Green Man Gaming aimed to keep its premiere spot in the ecommerce and gaming industries by growing its business globally and attracting more customers through increased localization. In 2017 they announced plans to branch out to the German market and localize their retail website. Their goals were to test the feasibility of international expansion, testing one market as a preliminary to massive future expansion. The trial market needed to provide quick and definite ROI in the form of revenue to justify any costs incurred as well as a massive growth in customer base outside the UK.

Needs

Green Man Gaming brought a number of highly complex needs to the table:

Variety of content sources:

Some content comes directly from site developers in English; other content comes in the form of an external feed from game producers. The site needed to be able to determine in real time which content to display, displaying some content natively while translating other content. To make things even more complicated, the site is constantly being updated.

Localization beyond web content:

Beyond displaying different content in different countries, Green Man Gaming also needed to be able to offer changing payment options based on geographic location. And they wanted an integrated approach that would streamline with their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and other forms of customer communication.

Testing without commitment:

And on top of everything else, they needed to be able to test their international expansion without a lot of risk and investment, ruling out any solution that would require a huge investment of capital or resources, long-term commitment, or site overhaul.

Potential Solutions

Given all these complex needs, company executives decided they had two main options—but neither seemed all that appealing:

Ready-made Plugin Solution

A plugin would have been the most affordable option. But initial investigation revealed that most plugins were limited in their scope, inflexible, unable to handle all their translation sources, unable to integrate, and unable to keep up with constant site updates.

In-House Custom Solution

This option would have been more expensive and would also delay Green Man Gaming’s time to entry into the new market by about nine months, when they needed to expand as soon as possible. It would also have required heavy integration to make it work with their site, including possible site downtime, which was unacceptable to company executives. Initial ROI would be low as they made back all they had invested in developing a custom localization solution, and it would be impossible to back out or choose another option after spending months localizing the site… a move that could severely affect the company’s day to day operations. Obviously, neither of these solutions was acceptable. Then, Green Man Gaming discovered Bablic.

Bablic’s Solution

Integration with Bablic took 3 months, at a fraction of the cost of any other solution the company had investigated. Bablic was able to combine translation of content on the fly with existing content streams. And thanks to Bablic’s API, Green Man Gaming was also able to create an integrated approach to localization which streamlined all incoming feeds and components.

Most importantly, once Bablic was in place, the solution was completely seamless and invisible to end users accessing the site from its new German-speaking market. All they experienced was a site in their own language, their own currency and payment options, with all images, buttons, URLs and any other site information in a form they could understand.

Once Green Man Gaming passed its growth targets in the German market, the trial was declared an unparalleled success.

Since that initial expansion, Green Man Gaming has expanded its use of Bablic, branching out into the Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Thai gaming markets with great results.

Bablic’s combination of flexibility, working with a range of site options and content sources, along with the power to handle updates and scale up as needed, has proven a key element in Green Man Gaming’s international expansion.

Today, Green Man Gaming is already planning its next stage, which will use funds from its IPO to pursue massive international localization. With 4.7 million registered customer accounts, the company is already doing business in 195 countries and is now planning to take on new markets like India, the Middle East and China. Bablic plans to be there with them every step of the way.

Bablic is built from the ground up with ecommerce in mind. If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution that helps you branch out into your target market fast and delivers ROI from Day One, get in touch to see what Bablic can do for your ecommerce site.