The Shopify ecosystem isn’t particularly designed with mainland China users in mind, so we wanted to figure out if it’s feasible to use in China. Some systems that we work with are such a hassle to adapt to telegram in philippines China that it isn’t worth it. Luckily, Shopify is OK for use in China, as long as some adjustments are made.
OpenBCI already has some customers in China although they haven’t advertised there yet. So, in my opinion, even just improving the performance of the website alone will help boost sales.
Here are some steps you can take to improve your Shopify site for Chinese users.
For the rest of the article, note that we’re mostly talking about shop.openbci.com, which is the part of the site based on Shopify. We also performed similar improvements on the rest of the site though.
Table of Contents
Optimizing Shopify Load Speed For China
USE JQUERY FILES FROM CHINA
RESIZE AND COMPRESS IMAGES
TESTING
Improving Shopify Site Usability for China
ALIPAY
LOCALIZATION
DESIGN
Optimizing Shopify Load Speed For China
The site took 1.1 minutes to load in China. That’s a long time, right? After a few adjustments, it only took 6 seconds to load all functionality. There were a couple of remaining scripts that took longer, but those did not impact usability.
USE JQUERY FILES FROM CHINA
Jquery files are third-party files that are used to add additional functionality to a website. For example, the rotating banner effect on OpenBCI’s site is done with Jquery.
The problem is that many of them are hosted outside of China. Within China, they may be slow to load or not load at all.
So we used new URLs that load Jquery files within China. Specifically, instead of using one from Google APIs, we used one from Staticfile.