Hansem Global's E-commerce Localization Success with iHerb

Empowering iHerb Consumers: Hansem Global’s Solution for Enhanced Product Understanding

Discover what Hansem Global focused on in localizing the website of iHerb, an e-commerce company that provides a variety of eco-friendly wellness products, including dietary supplements, hypoallergenic cosmetics, etc. Learn about the challenges, innovative solutions, and outstanding outcomes.

The number of products treated by iHerb reaches 45,000. All the products’ names should be localized per specific guidelines.

Project Summary

Since 1996, iHerb has been offering Earth’s best-curated selection of health and wellness products. The company is already well known among Korean customers who try to achieve wellness and beauty at the same time. As of 2024, iHerb serves 11 million customers in 180 countries worldwide, providing 19 languages, including Korean. Since the demand for eco-friendly wellness products is growing, Hansem Global keeps working on localizing thousands of iHerb offerings.

Challenges

Multiple scientific expressions
iHerb’s best-selling products are dietary supplements and eco-friendly cosmetics. Each product’s “Description” page is filled with multiple chemical and biological terms with high level of expertise. While maintaining consistency, we must apply the right Korean equivalents widely used in academia and related industries. If the product description explains its medication method and dose, we should also meticulously check numerical values. Mistranslating descriptions that include how and how often consumers should take certain ingredients will cause severe consequences, including side effects.

Consistencies across vast number of products
The number of products treated by iHerb reaches 45,000. All the products’ names should be localized per specific guidelines. Consistency throughout the product family must be maintained if the same company manufactures it. This principle must be kept to avoid confusing customers.

Our Solutions

Apply the most accurate target term
Term Base (TB) is a glossary synchronized within a CAT tool to ensure the highest level of expertise and consistency of term-level translations. While translating or reviewing, linguists can refer to the TB listed on the right of the dashboard.

Phrase dashboard with TB on the right

Sort a group of similar sentences
TB truly is a great way to localize each term correctly. But we also want to improve sentence-level accuracy. In that case, we can input any words in the filter in the upper-middle. This feature is extremely helpful when we want to find all the sentences that include specific words not saved in the TB.

Filter activated to find all the sentences containing specific term

You can see how the label looks like while translating (Context preview)
When it comes to website localization, we must check reader-friendliness from the viewpoint of an actual end user. To make shoppers enjoy a pleasant experience, the website’s product description should be neatly aligned, with accurate translations and all the elements in the right places. However, simply checking each segment one by one won’t be helpful to achieve this goal. On the bottom of the dashboard, the Preview panel will show us how the webpage will look when localized. We can ensure the right style for each item on the description page.

Preview panel shown on the bottom of the dashboard

Quality check before delivery
Once finished, we still have one more step before delivery. Even the best linguist on Earth can make mistakes. This is why every CAT tool has its own QA Checker. While working on any localization projects, including iHerb, there should be no exemption from quality assurance (QA). The QA Checker will detect errors, like mismatching or omitted tags, non-compliance with the TB, inconsistent translations, mismatching numbers, translations that are too short or too long, etc. Because of the nature of iHerb projects that handle wellness products, running QA Checker before delivery is one of the cornerstones.

Outcome

Thanks to our rigorous effort to maximize the quality, we received an “Excellent” grade on most projects. iHerb gives us an evaluation sheet called “Score Card” after finishing each project, and more than 90 percent of all the projects handled by Hansem Global this year (from January to April) won the highest grade.
We maintain a high level of expertise and consistency, powered by actively reporting source errors to iHerb and suggesting TB updates for newly found term pairs.

Conclusion

iHerb’s business is thriving in Korea, thanks to Korean customers’ deep interest in vegan-friendly and cruelty-free cosmetics and dietary supplements. This trend also contributes to the increase of localization requests from the top-tier provider of wellness products. Hansem Global’s collaboration with iHerb is a source of developing competitiveness, fostering our capability in various fields. Our accumulated experience will keep our value as a leading language service provider hereafter.