Selling in French: Your Store for Québec Shoppers

Overview

Every BestWebby storefront can be shown in French. A shopper reads it in French when they pick Français in the language list at the bottom of the store, when you make French the store's own language (below), or, if you have not set a store language, when their browser asks for French. The French is Canadian French, written the way shoppers in Québec read it: courriel, panier, passer la commande, taxes, with prices written 12,34 $.

Two kinds of words appear on your store, and they are handled differently:

• The store's own text — buttons, labels, the checkout, the confirmation page, the emails we send for you. BestWebby writes these, and they are translated for you.
• Your text — product names and descriptions, your pages, your menus, your own email wording. You write these, so they show in French only where you have written a French version.

Make French the first language (Québec stores)

1. Go to Channels → Sites.
2. In your store's Language field, enter fr-CA and click away from the field to save it.

Shoppers then see the store in French unless they pick another language in the footer; their choice is remembered on their device. Use en-CA to open in English instead. The same field tells search engines which language the store is in, so set it to the language your pages are actually written in.

What is translated for you

• The header, footer and cart, including the slide-out cart.
• The whole checkout: every field and message, delivery options and dates, the payment choices (including Interac e-Transfer), the order summary, and the line a shopper accepts when they place the order, with its links to your terms, privacy and refund policies.
• The order confirmation page, and the page a shopper returns to after paying with a method that leaves the site.
• Signing in and the whole account: order history, loyalty points and rewards, buying again, saved addresses and cards, returns, subscriptions, store credit, referrals, call preferences, and the privacy section (downloading your data, asking for your account to be deleted).
• The order tracking page, including an order still waiting for its e-Transfer.
• Gift cards: choosing and sending one on the product page, and the balance check page.
• The messages a shopper sees when checkout cannot go ahead, such as an item running out or a code that does not apply, and the same kind of message on the account pages (a return that is past its window, a reward they do not have the points for).
• Shopper emails: the order confirmation, shipped and delivered notices, cancellation and refund emails, ready-for-pickup, Interac e-Transfer payment instructions and expiry, the sign-in link, back-in-stock, the review request, the carrier updates (out for delivery, ready to collect from the carrier, a delivery problem, delivered), the abandoned-cart reminders, the gift card email, the loyalty reward email, the referral invitation and reward emails, the partner sign-in link, the data deletion receipt, and the standard welcome, delivered and win-back emails.
• Tax lines: when your tax rules are labelled GST, HST, QST or PST, a French checkout shows them as TPS, TVH, TVQ and TVP. A label you wrote yourself in any other words is shown as you wrote it.

Which language an email is sent in

An email is sent in the language the shopper was using, recorded at the moment they gave us their address:

• Order emails (confirmation, shipping, carrier updates, refund, review request): the language they checked out in. The tracking link in them opens the tracking page in that language too.
• Abandoned-cart reminders: the language they were browsing in when their cart was saved.
• Back-in-stock: the language they were using when they joined the waiting list.
• Sign-in link, loyalty reward, data deletion receipt and partner sign-in link: the language of the page they asked from.
• Referral invitation: the language of the shopper who sends it from their account page; their friend gets it in that language.
• Referral reward: the language of the referrer's most recent order.
• Gift card email: the language of the person who bought the card, both when it is sent straight away and when it is scheduled for a later date. The person receiving it has never visited your store, so the buyer's language is the one we have.

Carts and waiting lists saved before French was available, gift cards bought before then, and anything with no language recorded, are sent in English.

Translating your own text

• Products: open a product and use its Translations section to add a French name and description. A field you leave empty shows your original wording.
• Emails: under Settings → Email design, you can write your own wording per language. Your French wording replaces ours for French-speaking shoppers; the amounts, order details and branding stay as they are.
• Pages and policies: publish your own French pages. If you publish a policy page (privacy, refund, terms or shipping) in the Pages builder, the footer and the checkout link to yours.

What stays in English for now

• The default store policies BestWebby writes for you (privacy, refund, terms and shipping) are in English. If you sell in Québec, publish French versions of them as your own policy pages.
• Return reasons a shopper picks are shown to them in French but reach you in English, so every return in your dashboard reads the same way.

Good to know

• The other storefront languages (Deutsch, Español, Nederlands, Português, Italiano) cover browsing and the cart, and most shopper emails go out in them too: order confirmation, shipping and carrier updates, cancellation, refund, pickup, the sign-in link, back-in-stock, review request, gift card, loyalty, referral and partner emails, and the data deletion receipt. Their checkout and account pages, the abandoned-cart reminders and the e-Transfer emails are in English.
• BestWebby is not endorsed by or affiliated with Interac Corp. A French-speaking shopper reads the same statement in French wherever the e-Transfer is offered.
• Québec's Charter of the French Language asks that a business's website, order documents and the terms a customer accepts be available in French. The French described here is the part BestWebby provides; your own product text, pages and policies are yours to translate. This is information, not legal advice.