Multilingual online store: ET, EN, RU and FI
In Estonia a multilingual online store is the rule rather than the exception. Russian-speaking shoppers are a large part of the local market, Finland is the nearest foreign market, and an English version is needed for everyone who lives in Estonia but doesn't read Estonian. The question usually isn't whether to build a multilingual online store, but how to do it so that every new product doesn't mean manual work in four languages.
I wrote about the benefits of a multilingual website in general in multilingual website or online store — for whom and why. Here I focus on the practical side: what a multilingual online store needs to do technically, and how it works on the NUNDINAE platform.
Multilingual online store: three common mistakes
Half the shop is untranslated. The product descriptions exist in Russian, but the category texts, the basket and the confirmation emails are in Estonian. The customer reaches checkout and doesn't understand what they're being asked.
The translation goes out of date. The Estonian description was corrected, the price and composition changed, but the English version stayed old. Now the two languages say different things.
Machine translation overwrites manual work. Someone carefully corrected the Finnish text — and the next automatic translation overwrote it.
A good system avoids all three.
Four languages, one catalogue
The NUNDINAE shop works in Estonian, English, Russian and Finnish. The languages don't have to be managed as separate shops: there's one catalogue, one stock level and one customer register, and every product, category and content page simply exists in several languages. If you sell the last item at the Estonian-language till, it disappears from the Russian-language shop too — because it's the same product in the same stock.
Estonian sits at the address without a prefix, the other languages with a prefix (/en, /ru, /fi). The language switcher is in the header. You switch on only the languages you need.
Machine translation fills in, a person approves
The translations view shows the state of each language: what's translated, what's missing, what's out of date. In the translator view the source text and the translation sit side by side, so correcting is quick even if you don't master the language perfectly yourself.
The division of work is simple:
- Machine translation fills in missing and outdated translations. A new product exists in every language straight away, not only once someone has time.
- You or a translator review what matters most — the home page, the most popular products, the shipping and returns terms.
- Machine translation doesn't change manually approved translations. Once you've corrected a text, it stays your version.
This means that in a shop with 2,000 products you don't have to translate everything by hand. Machine translation provides the base and human time goes where it counts.
Brand names aren't translated
Machine translation wants to translate everything, including what it mustn't. A brand name that also happens to be an ordinary word turns into something else in Russian. NUNDINAE has additional machine translation rules where you list brand names and terms that must not be translated. A rule applies to all products at once.
What to think through besides the texts
A multilingual online store isn't just translation. Check these too:
- Payment methods. For Montonio bank links, you set in the settings which country's banks appear as logos at checkout (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Finland). Card payments, Apple Pay and Google Pay work regardless of language. More on the setup in Montonio payments in an online store.
- Shipping. Shipping methods and rates can be set by country, postcode, weight and order value. If you sell to Finland, shipping to Finland needs to be thought through separately — see online store shipping: parcel lockers and rates.
- Phone number. A local number automatically gets the +372 prefix (Estonia's country code); a customer from abroad must be able to enter a number from their own country.
- Customer service. Can you answer an email in Russian or Finnish? If not, say so honestly in the shop.
The shop assistant speaks the customer's language
If you switch on the shop chatbot, it replies in the customer's language — Estonian, English, Russian or Finnish — and recommends only products that are currently in stock. You can write the button text, greeting and window title separately in each language. More on the assistant in AI shopping assistant for an online store.
Search engines see every language
A multilingual online store brings in search traffic only if search engines find every language. The NUNDINAE shop provides search engines with its own sitemap containing all visible pages, products and categories in every language. The content comes from the server, so Google sees the page the way the customer does — not an empty shell that only fills up in the browser.
In the admin you can also see which searches bring people to you from Google and what customers couldn't find in the shop search — often a sign that product information is missing in one of the languages.
What stays in Estonian
Honestly: the NUNDINAE admin is currently in Estonian. The shop itself is in four languages, but the staff view, buttons and settings are in Estonian. For an Estonian business that usually isn't a problem; if your team speaks other languages, let's talk about it first.
Summary
A multilingual online store makes sense when your customers really do speak several languages — in Estonia that's usually the case. What matters is that the languages aren't four separate shops but one shop in four languages: one catalogue, one stock, machine translation as the base and human approval where it counts.
If you currently have a single-language online store, or four shops you keep in sync by hand, order NUNDINAE or ask for a demo. I'll migrate your existing products and set up the languages for your market.
