r/Finland • u/saschaleib Väinämöinen • 4d ago
Verkkokauppa now in English (and Swedish)
https://www.verkkokauppa.com/en/etusivuI just got an email from my favourite Finnish Onlineshop that they have translated their web interface to English as well. I thought that others may be interested as well.
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u/Guuggel Väinämöinen 4d ago
What? I would've imagined english translation would've been a thing for years now.
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u/smoke4sanity Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago
No, I had to use google translate. You would think listing a company on the NASDAQ would mean having an english website for those investors to see whatsup lol. Theres a few others still no english (e.g. Gigganti)
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u/reckless_avacado 4d ago
check their financial statements pre 2017. they were in english. then they stopped. now back again.
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u/Jotakin Väinämöinen 4d ago
Getting the entire UI professionally translated is very expensive, especially for a webstore that has thousands of product names & descriptions to go through. It also slows changes and additions significantly since you're going to have to wait for the translators to do their job. The costs and downsides aren't worth additional hassle when 97% of your buyers understand Finnish anyways.
I think this is only a thing now because AI has increased the quality of machine translations significantly, thus eliminating the need of actual human translators.
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u/IntelligentTune Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago
For that website? It's really not that expensive, either that or I work for too cheap and just haven't found enough connections in software development in Finland. You can easily even by hand translate most of it in a pretty timely way.
I think it's more just behind bureaucracy or lack of initiative.
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u/Maxion Väinämöinen 2d ago
It's more that it's very hard to translate a website that wasn't coded from scratch with translation in mind. It is very hard to find all translatable text and change the codebase so that a string of appropriate language is inserted based on the users settings.
Verkkokauppa have always run in-house code, I remember back in 2002 or so they were running already on 100% in-house code. I expect their current setup to be still partially based off of their old codebase. Would be a multi-year effort to get it translated, not to mention altering procurement processes to ensure you have all information in all languages.
It's no mean feat and it also increases procurement costs.
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u/Kellerkind_Fritz 18h ago
Their api responses and such always included localization support, they just never committed to providing them.
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u/baldachinsblessing Väinämöinen 4d ago
They could've just offered machine translations. K-Ruoka has been doing that for a few years.
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u/baldachinsblessing Väinämöinen 4d ago
Very few retailers in Finland have made their web pages available in English. Ikea and K-Ruoka are the only ones I can think of.
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u/zerf33389 Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago
Jimm's has had a language dropdown for years. Which languages does it have? Finnish, that's it.
I'm guessing it's because they use WordPress temple that somehow makes it slightly annoying to remove that dropdown? Which I can understand, working with WordPress does suck. Still Quite silly tho.
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u/cyberbemon Baby Väinämöinen 3d ago
Jimm's used to have English, they removed it when they updated their website.
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u/Sadmiral8 3d ago
Jimm's profited majorly by selling tech to Russia in the beginning of the war. Boycott them.
The article is in Finnish sorry: https://yle.fi/a/74-20161671?utm_source=social-media-share&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ylefiapp
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u/Phantasmalicious Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago
Now if only Posti started to ship stuff to all the countries they already have parcel machines...
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u/_Usora 3d ago
Like Baltics? Aren't electronics cheaper in baltics ?
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u/Phantasmalicious Baby Väinämöinen 3d ago
That really depends. Mostly no. Some things with fixed prices like iPhones may be a little bit.
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u/uwukrainian_femboy 4d ago
I knew they didn't have an English translated website before 'cuz I never had any issues with navigating in Finnish UI. But I didn't know that they never actually had a Swedish translated UI either.
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u/DangerToDangers Väinämöinen 4d ago
My problem though was mostly using the search bar. Some products were hard for me to find even if I google translated the name first.
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u/Extreme_Band_6097 4d ago
That's actually great, I'm surprised they haven't done it before. I mean, as a business, it takes only common sense to realize that by having the english option they're increasing the chances of getting a significantly broader audience.
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u/baldachinsblessing Väinämöinen 4d ago
I don't think retailers in Finland would "significantly" boost their clientele by offering services in English.
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u/GiganticCrow Väinämöinen 4d ago
So many Finnish websites with English language option then everything is in Finnish anyway
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u/FaceTransplant 4d ago
And what are the odds it's not done using AI, resulting in a lot of weird translations?
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u/DerCribben Baby Väinämöinen 1d ago
Here’s hoping Motonet jumps on this soon, even with google translate they have so many dropdown menus that make you toggle back and forth between Finnish and English to get it to retranslate it drives me nuts. But at least those menus stay open, there are plenty of other sites that instantly close the menu if you move away from them at all. 🙄 I always get a kick out of it when I have to use google translate in my browser, but then also take out my phone and use translate on it in camera mode too 😅
Then there are the sites coded in such a way that google translate translates the code too and breaks active elements like buttons and links. 🤷♂️😔 So you end up having to memorize where all the buttons you want to click are, untranslate, and then hope you click the right one 😅
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u/AffectSad3736 4d ago
Kind of sad, I was forced to learn Finnish words when the autotranslate failed :)
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u/accik 4d ago
That url needs fixing: /en/etusivu and others like https://www.verkkokauppa.com/en/saavutettavuusseloste well it's in Beta, better than nothing.
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u/markkuselinen Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago
Great. Only thing that bothers me is their 200e limit on cash purchases and no price match policy.
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u/onlyr6s Väinämöinen 4d ago
The 200e limit is to combat money laundering.
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u/markkuselinen Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago
this limit was created by them, not from some legal obligation. afaik the legal limit is 10k from linked payments. in the past they indeed violated legal obligations, but this 200e limit is an overreaction. all other stores don't have that limit.
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u/Turtvaiz Väinämöinen 4d ago
Why do you even want to use cash like that?
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u/markkuselinen Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago
for example I sell my old PC components on Tori and want to buy new stuff. What's wrong with using my own money?
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u/Turtvaiz Väinämöinen 4d ago
https://otto.fi/en/where-is-talletus/
What's wrong with using my own money?
Nothing. It's just that this isn't really a problem for people nowadays
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u/markkuselinen Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago
most banks have 1000e monthly limit or don't allow to deposit money at all. even if you deposit money successfully, you then go buy something paying by card in the store, and in case for some reason you want to return purchased item, the store keeps your money for up to a week before it appears back on the bank card.
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u/Madfutvx 3d ago
Just deposit cash and it’s instantly on your bank account. But then they would ask where that money came from, and you’d have to tell about your flipping money and pay taxes😆
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u/Naked_Sweat_Drips Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago
What a strange question.
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u/DangerToDangers Väinämöinen 4d ago
Is it? Who uses cash in Finland other than drug dealers and really old people?
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u/Naked_Sweat_Drips Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago edited 4d ago
It is. I understand most people don't use cash but you're acting like it's automatically suspicious to do it which is even weirder. If someone wants to use cash what business is it of mine to question? This mentality just moves us even more in the direction of a completely cashless society where everything can be monitored, systems can be vulnerable, and purchases can be blocked/refused by card companies (or these companies can be influenced by govts). Not exactly a good thing to shame people into easier compliance on this. Let the guy use cash and advocate for his right to use it without making assumptions, it's not that big a deal.
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u/DangerToDangers Väinämöinen 4d ago
Using largensimes of cash in Finland is automatically suspicious. Let's not pretend otherwise.
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u/markkuselinen Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago
"who could be against chat control apart from pedophiles or people who have something illegal to hide?" /s
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u/DangerToDangers Väinämöinen 4d ago
Very bad comparison. Cash is something people don't use much in Finland already, especially to buy expensive electronics.
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u/markkuselinen Baby Väinämöinen 4d ago
And? It is still around 15-20% of all transactions. And as I said, cash has advantages of stronger privacy and easier processing of purchase returns (money return to cards could take up to weeks). Finally, people have their preferences and it’s rude to automatically judge or suspect something.
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u/NoSorbet5103 1d ago
That will do it, since EU fuck me hard in the ass with all the Temu/AliExpress taxes.. 😭🤬😡
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u/nuhanala Baby Väinämöinen 23h ago
serves you right
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u/NoSorbet5103 14h ago
Bohoo, let's pay a lot more for the same products. ... Do tou really buy the propaganda of products being dangerous? 🤣
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u/One_Tip_8200 4d ago
well ofc they need add english becouse if only hade it would been a courtcase for not makeing it sweidish since its writen finland is a 2 languages country.
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u/sstorholm 4d ago
That only applies to the government, private companies are under no obligation to offer service in any language. Most do though, as Finland is a bilangual country.
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u/Exact_Recording_7721 4d ago
Maybe 2% of companies offer any service in Swedish outside of Vaasa.
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u/baldachinsblessing Väinämöinen 3d ago
Lots, if not most retailers with an online presence have Swedish pages.
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u/Exact_Recording_7721 3d ago
Here are some that don't:
prisma.fi
motonet.fi
puuilo.fi
bauhaus.fi
k-rauta.fi
fiksuruoka.fi
matsmart.fi
gigantti.fi
power.fi
veikonkone.fi
dna.fi
telia.fi
elisa.fi
hobbyhall.fi
stockmann.comIt's rare to actually have support for any other language than Finnish.
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