Selling Online in Spanish: How to Localize Your Ecommerce Store

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Selling online in Spanish takes more than translated product pages. You need to pick the right variety of Spanish for your market, research Spanish keywords rather than translating English ones, show local prices, formats and payment methods, and publish the Spanish store on its own indexable URLs. The audience is very large: 635.7 million people can speak Spanish, and 520 million speak it natively (Instituto Cervantes, October 2025).

Key takeaways

• Spanish is a big language with a relatively thin web: 6.0% of websites whose content language is known are in Spanish, against 49.5% in English (W3Techs, 28 September 2026).
• Decide early between Spain Spanish (es-ES), Mexican (es-MX), a Latin American neutral version (es-419) or US Spanish (es-US). Vocabulary, formats and tone differ.
• In the US, Spanish is the most common language spoken at home after English. Bilingual shoppers still respond to Spanish-language pages.
• Spanish keywords must be researched per market: “zapatillas” in Spain are “tenis” in Mexico.
• Local payment methods, currency and formats matter as much as the text.
• Start with the pages that sell: product, category, cart, checkout and shipping information.

Why Spanish is worth prioritising

Three numbers explain why:

1. Size. The Instituto Cervantes counts 635.7 million potential Spanish speakers in 2025, including 520 million native speakers (Instituto Cervantes).
2. Too little content. Spanish is the second most-used content language on the web, but only 6.0% of websites use it (W3Techs). Many product searches in Spanish have fewer strong local-language results than the same search in English.
3. People prefer to buy in their own language. In CSA Research’s survey of 8,709 consumers across 29 countries, 76% preferred buying products with information in their native language and 40% said they never buy from websites in other languages (CSA Research, 2020).

The US Spanish-speaking market

For US stores, Spanish is also a domestic opportunity. In the Census Bureau’s 2018-2022 American Community Survey estimates, Spanish accounted for 61.1% of people who spoke a language other than English at home, and 61.0% of those Spanish speakers spoke English “very well” (U.S. Census Bureau, December 2023).

The second number is the interesting one. Many of these shoppers could read your English site, so a Spanish version is less about comprehension and more about comfort and trust, especially for larger purchases, family decisions and support questions. A clear language switcher lets each visitor pick.

Step 1: Choose your Spanish

“Spanish” covers several locales. These are the main choices:

The versions differ in a few ways:

• Vocabulary. Computer: ordenador (Spain) vs computadora (Latin America). Mobile phone: móvil vs celular. Sneakers: zapatillas (Spain) vs tenis (Mexico). Car: coche vs carro or auto.
• Forms of address. Spain uses vosotros for plural “you”; Latin America uses ustedes. Many brands choose informal tú in both regions for marketing copy, and usted for formal contexts such as legal or financial services. Pick one and put it in your style guide.
• Formats. In Spain a price is written 12.345,50 €; in Mexico $12,345.50. Dates are day first in both (27/09/26), unlike US English.

If you can only afford one version, start with the market where you already get visitors or sales, and serve it with the right code. You can add a second variety later.

Step 2: Research Spanish keywords, don’t translate them

Keyword research is where most Spanish launches go wrong. A literal translation of your English keyword can be grammatically correct and still get almost no searches. Or it matches the Spain term when your buyers are in Mexico.

Here is a simple process:

1. List your top 20 English product and category keywords.
2. For each, collect the terms Spanish speakers in your target country actually use: ask native speakers, check the vocabulary on local competitors’ category pages, and look at Google’s autocomplete and “People also ask” with the country set (our guide to seeing Google results for other countries shows how).
3. Check volumes in your keyword tool for that country, not globally.
4. Use the winning term in the page title, H1, category name, URL slug and product description.

Our international keyword research guide covers the method in more detail.

Step 3: Localize the pages that sell first

Translate in order of revenue impact:

1. Product pages: title, description, specifications, size charts, variant names (colours and sizes are easy to forget).
2. Category and collection pages: names, filters, sort options.
3. Cart and checkout: buttons, error messages, form labels, shipping and tax lines.
4. Trust pages: shipping, returns, warranty, contact and FAQ.
5. Transactional emails: order confirmation, shipping notification, abandoned cart.
6. Marketing content: home page banners, campaign pages, then the blog.

Have a fluent Spanish speaker review steps 1 to 3 at least once. Short strings like “Add to cart” (Añadir al carrito in Spain, Agregar al carrito is common in Latin America) set the tone for the whole store.

Step 4: Adapt prices, payments and shipping

The text can be perfect and the sale still fail at checkout:

• Show prices in EUR for Spain and MXN for Mexico if your store and payment provider can charge in them. A USD price on a Mexican page makes shoppers do maths and guess at fees.
• Offer local payment methods alongside cards. In Mexico, for example, OXXO lets customers pay online purchases in cash at a convenience store with a voucher; Stripe describes how it works in its OXXO documentation. Check what your payment provider supports for each country.
• State delivery times, costs and who pays import duties, in Spanish, before checkout.
• Returns and consumer rights differ between Spain (EU rules) and Latin American countries. Have someone qualified localize the policies instead of translating the US version word for word.

Step 5: Make the Spanish store findable

Search engines need to know the Spanish pages exist and who they are for:

• Give each language its own URL, for example example.com/es/ or es.example.com. Google recommends separate URLs for each language version rather than switching language with cookies (Google Search Central).
• Add hreflang tags that link the English and Spanish versions, with region codes if you run more than one Spanish variant.
• Translate the metadata: page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text and structured data.
• Translate slugs where your platform allows it (/es/zapatillas-running/ rather than /es/running-shoes/).
• Show a visible language switcher, and don’t force-redirect people based on IP. Many US visitors from Spanish-speaking families switch between languages.

Step 6: Measure the Spanish store separately

Track Spanish as a channel of its own:

• Search Console: filter by country and by the /es/ folder to see Spanish impressions, clicks and positions.
• Analytics: conversion rate, average order value and cart abandonment for the Spanish version compared with the original.
• Support: count tickets in Spanish and the questions they ask; they show what your pages don’t explain yet.

Give it a few months before you judge it. New language pages take weeks to build search visibility.

How ConveyThis helps you sell in Spanish

ConveyThis translates your store into Spanish (and any other of its 210 languages) and publishes it on its own URL as a subfolder or subdomain (Business plan and higher) or with a language parameter, with hreflang tags, translated meta titles and descriptions, and translated JSON-LD. It installs as a Shopify app, a WooCommerce/WordPress plugin or a script on other platforms.

The tools for making the Spanish read naturally:

• A visual editor to review product names, buttons and checkout text in place.
• Glossary rules to fix regional vocabulary, for example always tenis instead of zapatillas for a Mexican audience, and to keep brand names untranslated.
• Team roles, so a Spanish-speaking colleague or freelancer can review translations without access to your billing.
• Image replacement for banners and size charts with text in them.

Words are counted only when a visitor sees translated content, and bots don’t count, so Google crawling your Spanish pages doesn’t use up your plan. The Starter plan ($12 a month for 30,000 words and one language) covers a single added language such as Spanish; subfolder or subdomain URLs start on Business ($24 a month, 100,000 words, 3 languages). Every tier is on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

Should I use Spain Spanish or Latin American Spanish? Use the variety of the market where most of your buyers are. If you serve several Latin American countries, a Latin American version (es-419) with neutral vocabulary is a reasonable start.

Is machine translation good enough for a Spanish store? It gives a solid first draft. Have a fluent speaker review product titles, checkout and legal pages, and use a glossary for recurring terms.

Do bilingual US shoppers really need Spanish pages? Many can read English, but the choice matters for trust and comfort on important purchases. A language switcher lets each shopper decide, and Spanish pages also rank for Spanish searches.

Next step

Pick your Spanish variant and your first 20 keywords, then create a ConveyThis account and publish the Spanish version of your top product pages. The Free plan (5,000 words, one language, no card) lets you check the result on your own store before you pay anything.