Initially, I planned to create a shopping mall in all languages used worldwide. As it was my first time creating an overseas shopping mall, I felt a bit overwhelmed at first. Since Shopify only allows a maximum of 20 translations, I decided to open the store with a total of 21 languages, combining the basic Korean language with 20 translated languages. First, I created the Korean version of the shopping mall, followed by the English version. Ten months have passed since then. Next month, the Spanish version of the shopping mall will be created.
Currently, anyone around the world can access the Hemorium shopping mall and purchase all products. The initial screen of the Hemorium shopping mall, visible in all countries, is in English. Previously, the Korean and English versions alternated, but now only the English version is displayed. For those accessing from Korea or using Korean as their browser language, the Korean shopping mall will be visible. In the future, the language of the buyer's country will automatically be displayed.
It is expected to take about one month to convert one country's language version. This one-month period does not include the language conversion of the product detailed descriptions. The time taken for language conversion is likely to be shorter than expected. Converting the product detailed descriptions to the respective country's language will take a lot of time. Even with AI translation of product detailed descriptions, there will be a lot of manual corrections needed.
Since the shopping mall's language goal is 21 languages, including Korean and English, it means it will take another 19 months to complete the shopping mall. To become a truly international shopping mall with language translation of product detailed description pages, it will take several more years. This time calculation assumes one person is doing this work. Therefore, if the workforce is increased to 3 people, the period will naturally be reduced to 1/3, and if it's 10 people, it will be reduced to 1/10.
I started working on the Hemorium shopping mall after reading a book by someone who generated a net profit of $10,000 per month by selling Korean automotive parts worldwide through a Shopify store.
There are some differences since that person sold domestic auto parts overseas and I sell products through dropshipping, but the selling principle is the same, so there were not many difficulties in setting up the shopping mall. After 10 months of experience in creating an overseas shopping mall, I have a good grasp of the outline of setting up an overseas shopping mall.
As the number of listed products increases, the time required to modify products increases significantly. Currently, I will increase the number of products from about 1400 to 20,000. The biggest difficulty is the significant amount of time required for manual product modification. There are many tasks that cannot be solved by automatic or batch processing.
Payment processing is fundamental to operating a shopping mall, so it has been possible to make payments in the shopping mall for 9 months now. All payment tests were also completed at that time. Recently, there was a case where a real buyer successfully made a payment.
The final test for opening the shopping mall is a sales rehearsal. This is the cycle of buyer payment - payment of supplier cost to product supplier - product shipment - delivery completion - receipt of buyer payment. As this is an international shipping mall with a long delivery period, it will take about 2-3 weeks to test payments and delivery.
Before starting the final test for opening the shopping mall, I would like to briefly share my thoughts on the shopping mall work.
** The rock climbing image above was created at my request by Gemini, and it looks just like a real photo. The watermark, indicated by an diamond in the bottom right corner, shows that it was created by Gemini.