Longo Toyota launches Spanish website

Spanish step

Longo Toyota in El Monte, Calif., built a Spanish-language version of its website to communicate more directly with its ethnically diverse market.

Longo Toyota, the sprawling Southern California auto dealership that has built its business model around embracing the diversity of its customer base, has developed a store website for Spanish-speaking shoppers.

The site, which took around three months to create, is more than just a front door into the site’s existing pages. It’s a near match of its English-language counterpart with all of the necessary inventory listings and links to other key areas such as service and parts. It also includes a staff page showing the store’s Spanish-speaking staffers, just as the English site does.

The only omission, for now, is integration with Roadster’s Express Storefront platform, which lets consumers handle vehicle transactions online without coming to the dealership. Longo Toyota began using Roadster’s system last year, but Express Storefront doesn’t yet support Spanish. Roadster said it plans to have Spanish-language capabilities by the second half of next year.

While Longo Toyota’s English site has a Google translation tool for ethnic shoppers that converts some of the text to any of several languages, the store said it can miss certain nuances and doesn’t change text embedded in images, including some of the fine print on special offers. This can lead to translations that aren’t complete or entirely accurate.

The fully native Spanish site ensures that the wording comes across more naturally and accurately.

Spanish is the first language to get the full website treatment, but it’s possible that the El Monte, Calif., store could follow up with a Chinese site next, said Brendan Harrington, president of Longo Toyota. A Korean site is also a possibility later. Harrington believes a Chinese site would take about six months to develop.

“We take a lot of effort to make sure there are no links from the Spanish site to an English site,” Harrington said. “It wouldn’t make sense if you’re going down the funnel and then, all of a sudden, now I want to buy a car, but now I’m at an English piece. We make sure the whole journey is in Spanish to make that person more comfortable.”

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