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Translate product content for Shopify markets with AI

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Translating a product catalog manually can slow down product launches significantly, especially when content is spread across spreadsheets, translation tools, and different Shopify markets.

It can also make it harder to keep your terminology, formatting, and brand voice consistent across every language.

In this playbook, you’ll see how to use Plytix AI to translate product content in bulk, referencing your existing product information and branding guidelines, and send that translated content across your Shopify markets.

What you’ll learn

By the end of this playbook, you’ll know how to generate product translations in Plytix and sync them to Shopify, without moving content between separate tools or updating products one by one.

This workflow helps you:

  • Reach new markets faster
    Translate content in bulk across multiple languages, so you can prepare your catalog for new customers sooner.
  • Stay consistent with your brand
    Give the AI instructions for your tone, terminology, formatting, and other requirements so the generated content sounds like your brand.
  • Keep your content up to date
    Manage translations in one place and sync directly to Shopify across all your markets, so content stays updated whenever something changes.

Step-by-step guide

  1. Create an attribute for your translation
    Start by creating a text attribute where the translated content will be stored. For example, “Spanish description.” 
    Keeping the translation in a separate attribute lets you review and manage it without changing the original content.
  2. Choose the products you want to translate
    Select your full catalog or use filters to find a specific group of products.
  3. Write your translation prompt
    Choose the original attribute (i.e. “English description”) as your source and the new language attribute (i.e. “Spanish description”) as your output.
    Then write a prompt that tells the AI exactly how you want the content translated. Include details such as the target language, tone of voice, preferred terminology, formatting, and any character limits. You can also apply your brand guidelines to give the AI more context about how your company communicates.
  4. Generate your content
    Preview a sample of the result to make sure your prompt aligns with what you’re looking for. Then, click “generate” to apply translations in bulk to your selected products.
  5. Sync changes to Shopify
    Once you’re happy with the content, map the field to the relevant Shopify language in the “mapping” tab of your channel.
    Then, process your Shopify channel to send the updated content to your store.

Best practices and resources

Once you’ve generated your first translations, these tips will help you improve the quality of future results and keep localized content easier to manage.

Click on any of the tips below for a step-by-step guide.

  • Add your brand guidelines

    Give Plytix AI context about your tone of voice, preferred terminology, formatting rules, and words to avoid.

    Clear guidelines make it easier to generate translations that sound like your brand instead of generic translated copy.

  • Track missing content for each market

    Create a separate completeness attribute for each market or language so you can see which products are still missing translated content.

    For example, you could create a Spanish Market Completeness score that checks whether the Spanish title, description, and other required fields are ready.

  • Autofill missing translations with automations

    Set up an automation to generate translated content when a product is missing information for a specific market.

    This helps your team fill language attributes automatically as products are added or updated, instead of manually selecting products to edit with AI.

FAQs

What product content can I translate with Plytix AI?
Plytix AI can generate translations for product descriptions, features, specifications, marketing copy, and other text-based content using your own product context.
The AI can use other product information in Plytix as context when generating the translation.
Can I upload my own AI guidelines?
Yes, you can create different branding guidelines for Plytix AI to use. These let you define tone of voice, terminology, formatting preferences, blocked terms, and other rules you want AI to follow.
How do I send translations to Shopify?
Plytix syncs updates directly to Shopify, including translated content to different markets, after your channel is processed. Just sync your markets and languages in Plytix and you’ll be able to map translations like any other field. You can also sync translations for your metafields following the same steps. See all the different metafield types you can manage from Plytix.
Does Plytix AI only work for translating content?
No, you can use Plytix AI for any text-based content generation. A few common use cases include: generating a list of key features, optimizing product descriptions for SEO, adapting content to seasonal sales, and more. Here’s a list of a few more ideas for how to use AI in Plytix.
How much does Plytix AI cost?
Plytix AI is included for free in all accounts. You get a number of credits in any plan (yes, even on the free plan) that renew each month at no cost. If you need additional credits, you can request them here on a one-time or monthly basis.

Related playbooks

Once you’ve generated your translations, you can continue preparing and updating your Shopify product content from Plytix.

See what else you can do with Plytix: