Selling into Quebec: what a Shopify store actually needs in French

Why partial French loses the sale

Almost every store that decides to sell in French does the same thing, in the same order, and stops at the same place.

The theme gets translated, so the navigation, the buttons and the footer are in French. The checkout follows, because Shopify handles most of that. And then several hundred product descriptions stay in English, because that is the part that is genuinely a lot of writing rather than a settings change.

The result is a storefront that promises a French experience in its navigation and fails to deliver one at the exact moment the customer is deciding. Someone browsing in French, who then hits an English description full of the detail they need to choose a size or understand a material, is being told that they are not really the intended customer. Some of them will translate it themselves. Many will leave, and it will show up as a bounce nobody can explain.

For Quebec this is not a marketing preference. French is the language of commerce there, many businesses have legal obligations around it, and consumers notice the difference between a store built for them and a store translated at them.

The practical consequence is that a French rollout should be planned around the catalogue, not the theme, because the catalogue is where the cost and the value both are.

What has to be in French, in priority order

Product titles and descriptions come first, because they carry the sale. This is the expensive part and the part worth paying a person for.

Then the information that prevents returns and support tickets: sizing, materials, dimensions, care instructions. For fashion and furniture this is where most of the return volume and most of the customer emails originate, and getting it right in both languages pays for itself directly rather than through brand goodwill.

Then shipping and returns policy, in plain French, on a page a customer can find before they buy. Uncertainty here is a common reason a full cart does not convert.

Then the transactional and marketing emails. An order confirmation in English after a French checkout is a jarring end to an otherwise good experience, and abandoned-cart emails in the wrong language get ignored.

Collection pages and category text come after those. Blog content and anything editorial comes last, and honestly may never need doing.

Shopify supports this natively through Markets and its translation system, so you do not need a separate store or a separate domain for it. Get the structure right once and adding French is a content problem rather than an architectural one.

Machine translation, and where the line is

Automatic translation has a real place and a real limit, and being clear about which is which saves both money and embarrassment.

It is fine for structural and repeated text: navigation labels, button text, form fields, filter names. These are short, conventional, and a slightly stiff translation costs nothing.

It is not adequate for product copy that has to sell, and it fails in a way that is invisible to someone who does not read French fluently. Idiom goes wrong, product-specific vocabulary gets generic substitutes, and the tone lands somewhere between formal and odd. The store reads as though the business could not be bothered, which is precisely the opposite of the signal you were trying to send by translating it at all.

The workable compromise for a small store with a large catalogue: machine-translate the whole catalogue as a baseline so nothing is in English, then have a French writer rewrite properly, best sellers first. Your top twenty products usually cover the majority of revenue, so a partial rewrite captures most of the benefit at a fraction of the cost.

Then keep it accurate as the range changes, which is the part almost nobody resources. A bilingual catalogue drifts: new products arrive in English only, descriptions get edited on one side and not the other, and eighteen months later the French version is quietly worse than the English one. That ongoing maintenance is the actual work of selling in two languages, and it is why we treat it as catalogue management rather than a translation project.

We write in English and we do not pretend otherwise. Where a proper French rewrite is needed we quote for a French writer rather than passing off automated output as finished.