China’s online consumers are different to our own at home in Australia. They have different tastes and different expectations when they are evaluating a website for the first time. If you want to appeal to the Chinese online market you will need to tweak your site to make it more aesthetically appealing and user friendly.

So what do you need to make your website work for China?

First things first is to ensure your site is viewable from within China. There are a number of hosting companies that are blocked from viewing in China and you should check to make sure that yours is not one of them. This can be done by checking at www.blockedinchina.net. If the result of that search is ‘OK’, then you are off to a good start. If it says ‘no’, you will need to consider a new host.

Next you will need to provide substitutions for your YouTube, Facebook and Twitter feeds. These platforms are all banned in China and viewers there cannot see anything more than black boxes when they open a website with this content loaded onto the web page. It is best to use icons in their place, adding some Chinese equivalents such as Youku, Renren and Weibo. This will ensure the layout and aesthetics of the page is not affected when viewed from China.

While on the topic of social media, it is critical to understand its importance and even more so for Chinese online shoppers. A recent McKinsey research of 5,700 Chinese netizens found that Chinese shoppers felt that websites with a social media presence (Chinese one that is) were more trustworthy than those that didn’t. They were also more likely to make a purchase because of a recommendation they saw on social media about a product/service. Because of the banning of popular western social media platforms in China, you are therefore going to need to enrol in the Chinese equivalents. This is where it gets slightly more complicated, because it should come as no surprise that they are all in Chinese characters.

The reality of China’s 1.3 billion citizens with just under half of them all on the Internet, is that only around 2 percent speak and read English. It makes sense then that the majority of web related searches in China are in Chinese.

 

This is why having a Chinese version of your website is critical to your success if you want web traffic from China – it means people can and will read you and it gives you much broader reach.

 

This means too that you will need to have a Chinese Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy, because not only do people search in Chinese, so do the search engines.

Will a Google powered translation work?

Translating your English to Chinse marketing message is something you should invest in if you do nothing else.

 

Powering your site with Google Translate will not give you the desired effect you are looking for.

 

Employing a friend or relative to translate your site is also not necessarily the best option either. No one can put as much effort into your marketing message as you and so you should invest in a professional organisation that has the same dedication to the desired outcome that you do. The former Prime Minister Julia Gillard recently found this out the hard way when she received the bad news that her ‘Asian Century White Paper‘ had numerous translation errors in the Chinese version. This was one paper that really needed to be translated well.

You may have also heard the theory that Chinse websites tend to be content heavy, have lots of links and are quite busy. This would tend to be the case for many of the sites and the reason they look like this is in part due to the fact that to an English reader, they don’t know what they are looking at. Chinese characters appear complicated to the untrained eye simply because there are no spaces between characters, no capitals letters at the beginning of a sentence and most Chinese characters contain between 1- 20 brush strokes, in some cases a lot more.

In saying this though, there are many Chinese sites that do appear overwhelming, especially eCommerce sites. To rationalise this you need to appreciate the size and complexity of the market there. Web shopping giants such as Tmall.com for example have over 50,000 shop fronts, representing more than 70,000 brands. This means there’s a lot of marketing to be done, and to be heard you really need to be very loud, in web talk this translates as flashy and attention drawing banners, thus resulting in sites that look very busy and intense.

Being busy and having many links I do not believe is the rule of thumb for China, however being content rich can certainly add to your desirability. Keep in mind that for many shoppers in China, this may be the first time they have heard about you or your service concept, so education by providing high quality content will certainly add value and help aid the purchase making process.

My final piece of advice would be to deliver call to action that can be acted upon from China. That means a payment portal that accepts Renminbi (Chinese currency), a logistics solution that is quick and inexpensive and a payment process that is easy for a Chinese reader to follow. Have a customer service option that address their inquiries and is responsive and provides reassurances in the form or warranties or guarantees that your customer will be satisfied or looked after in the case there is a problem.

There is no simple three-step strategy to making your site suitable for China. However there are 580,000 million good reasons (and growing) why you should consider developing a planned and well-executed strategy! ■

*Lisa Goodhand is the Managing Director of China Blueprint Online. Lisa has been leading Australian companies into the China market for more than eight years, helping them to develop their export market strategies. Lisa formed China Blueprint Online to find new and more effective ways for small business to enter the China market.