Case Study — E-commerce Platform · Brazil (PT-BR)
The wrong “you” was costing $40K a month.
- Client
- Solmar, E-commerce Platform
- Market
- Brazil (PT-BR)
- Result
- −61% cart abandonment
The challenge
Solmar’s Brazilian storefront had traffic, competitive prices, and a checkout flow that tested perfectly — in European Portuguese, written in the formal register. Abandoned carts were costing an estimated $40K a month, concentrated in the final two checkout steps.
The audit found a tone problem, not a UX problem. The checkout addressed shoppers with formal pronouns no Brazilian uses when buying anything, payment-installment wording — the parcelamento terms — mismatched local card habits, and error messages blamed the customer instead of guiding them.
The sprint
What the twelve days covered
- Days 1–2: Checkout-focused audit — 480 strings across cart, payment, confirmation, and transactional email.
- Days 3–5: Register overhaul with São Paulo linguists: informal second person, local installment vocabulary, reassuring error copy.
- Days 6–8: Translation with a locked payments glossary so “boleto,” installments, and refund terms stay exact everywhere.
- Days 9–10: Screenshot QA on low-end Android viewports — 11 truncation fixes in payment buttons Portuguese expansion caused.
- Days 11–12: Staging review with Solmar’s e-commerce director and a same-day deploy.
Results
Cart abandonment in PT-BR fell 61% within a month. Checkout completion on mobile — 78% of Brazilian traffic — improved fastest, and the new payments glossary now ships with every Solmar locale.
“Twelve days later, that number dropped by 61%. The formal Portuguese was invisible to us — it took native ears to hear it.” — Isabela Carvalho, E-commerce Director, Solmar