COVID-19 has dramatically altered the way people purchase and consume products. As a result, retail and e-commerce companies have had to rethink how they operate and connect with customers.

PriceSmart is one of those companies. The multinational retail company is a shopping club that offers high quality goods at low prices for its members. Along with traditional merchandise, PriceSmart offers optical centers and tire balancing, and recently has opened its first pharmacies and audiology centers. The rapid growth the company has experienced before the pandemic has only accelerated in 2020 and beyond.

Though headquartered in San Diego, CA, PriceSmart is the largest membership warehouse club in Central America and the Caribbean and has a growing presence in South America as well. 

While localization has been a key component of PriceSmart’s growth strategy since its early days, it has only become more and more important as the company has grown and evolved into a more digital solution.

Localization started as a back-office requirement to make sure that supply chain and compliance processes were all well-communicated globally.  Today, language translation has become a key part of PriceSmart’s member-facing global experience strategy.

As the company continues to expand its offerings and the channels through which it communicates with its members, global experience and localization become more and more relevant.

The pandemic presented a new challenge for David Price, Vice President of Omnichannel Initiatives & Social and Environmental Responsibility at PriceSmart. Though PriceSmart’s online e-commerce sales started as only a small part of the business, it has since grown to become a significant portion of the total sales for the company throughout the pandemic.

With so many visitors to the site coming from so many different locales, building a unified global experience strategy to make sure all customers could access the information in the language they need became crucial to the company’s continued growth and success.

PriceSmart had unique content in both English and in Spanish, but much of that content had not been translated from one language into the other. With multiple technology systems in play, the company knew they needed to find a partner that could help it put a solution in place to both tackle their existing work, but also scale to meet new challenges as the volume of content grew.

In order to put foundational systems in place to help and start translating content for the correct locales, David started the search for a partner that could understand their needs for an end to end global experience for their members.

With the large volume of content to localize, David values the quickness and accuracy that LILT provides.

“We know that we will have a lot of content to get through going forward, so it’s really helpful to have a partner like LILT to help us be efficient and consistent with our translations," David said.

Looking ahead, David and his team at PriceSmart are figuring out new ways to provide members with the products and services they need in the language they understand, all while building for the future.

With a new mobile application recently launched and continuing development of PriceSmart’s Private Label, Member’s Selection, there is a lot of content coming and more opportunities ahead.