Salesforce B2C Commerce 24.7 > Developing Your Site > Localization

Locales

A locale represents a specific geographical, political, or cultural region. Salesforce B2C Commerce supports multiple locales for both the Business Manager user interface, and the underlying storefront site data.

B2C Commerce supports language-specific locales, in addition to country-specific locales, with an extended resource lookup sequence for all localized data.

Language-specific locales are included in Business Manager global preferences.
You can create locale-specific folders for image upload. When you create or manage language-specific image folders in Business Manager, the new locales appear in the locale select box, enabling you to create language-specific image folders, as for any other locale.
The lookup fallback sequence for all localizable resources (business object data, images, templates, messages) is consistent across B2C Commerce.

Note:

If you use the United Arab Emirates Dirham (AED) currency, we recommend that you show the amount value prefixed with the abbreviation currency, for example, (AED) 250. B2C Commerce does not currently handle certain UTF characters that are right-to-left. For example, gift certificates purchased under the AED currency do not show the amount under the list view. The list view is displayed when you select site > Merchant Tools > Online Marketing > Gift Certificates.

Configuring Locales

B2C Commerce is structured as an organization containing one or more sites (storefronts). To configure locales:

Use global preferences to configure the organization locales settings (for example, the Business Manager default user interface language, the default data language, and activating/deactivating locales), instance time zones, and store locator data (geolocation).
Use site preferences to configure storefront site currencies, locales, default country codes, and store lookup units (miles versus kilometers).
You can also configure locale-specific URLs.
Assign preferred locales by user for the Business Manager user interface.
Assign preferred locales for the underlying B2C Commerce data, such as products, content, orders, and customers.

Tip:

If you support multiple languages across sites, you might want to use a second language for your default language. For example, you could use French for the default language for France, Switzerland, and Luxembourg, but use country-specific resources for a portion of the data. In this case, typically you have multiple sites with shared resources and want to localize most of your data based on language rather than region. While sites using the same language (such as en), but different country (such as en_US, en_CA), might use some region or country-specific resources, most of the resources are the same.

Note: Some Business Manager elements can't be localized.

Business Manager Locales

Business Manager supports multiple languages in both its user interface and in the underlying data that is created, edited, and shown within it to be used in the storefront. You can configure locales separately for:

Viewing the application
Managing the data in a target language

For example, a user could view English products and content using a Japanese Business Manager.

There are two ways to select the Business Manager user interface locale:

Administrator: the administrator selects a preferred locale for the Business Manager display language. The interface shows a list of possible languages. The administrator can assign the preferred locale when creating a user profile, or editing an existing profile.
User: to select a different Business Manager display language, the user edits their user profile. The new locale appears for that user until the user selects another language.

To set a locale as preselected for all Business Manager pages that include localized attributes, you define the preferred locale (language) in a user profile. This locale (language) must have been previously activated for the instance through global preferences. This sets locales for:

Product
Catalog
Content
Search
Promotion rules
Customers
Custom objects
Ordering
Organization
Site development

To edit the locale, including specifying localized formats for attributes, dates, currency, quantity, and input settings, click the Locale ID link. If you want B2C Commerce to give you default formats, click Prefill after you select the locale.

Dictionary Fallback

You can define how linguistic search rules (stop words, category name exclusions, synonyms, hypernyms, compound words, common phrases, search suggestions, and stemming exceptions) are applied in a multi-locale site.

When you have configured the required locales, you must build search indexes for those locales. When customers use those locales (languages) in their search criteria, B2C Commerce is able to respond appropriately.