Shopify powers merchants in over 175 countries. If your app is on the App Store, a meaningful share of the people installing it don’t speak English as a first language — and many don’t speak it at all.

Yet most app teams support only in English. The result is quiet churn: a merchant in São Paulo or Berlin hits a problem, can’t explain it well in English, gives up, and uninstalls (or leaves a frustrated review).

You don’t need to hire a multilingual support team to fix this. Here’s how small app teams handle global support.

Why language is a bigger deal than it looks

Trust. Merchants are connecting their store and customer data to your app. Getting help in their own language signals that you take them seriously.
Resolution quality. A merchant describing a bug in their native language gives you far better detail than one fighting through a second language.
Reviews. “They even helped me in Portuguese” is the kind of detail that ends up in a five-star review.

Option 1: Human translation (doesn’t scale)

You can copy-paste into a translation tool for each message. It works for a handful of conversations, but it’s slow, error-prone, and breaks down the moment volume grows. It also adds latency to exactly the metric that matters most — first-response time.

Option 2: Pre-translated help articles

A multilingual help center deflects common questions before they reach you. It’s worth doing — but it only covers the predictable questions, not the live back-and-forth of real support.

Option 3: Automatic live translation

The scalable answer is translation built into the inbox. The merchant writes in their language, you read it in yours, you reply in yours, and they receive it in theirs — automatically.

This is how Convot handles it. Our inbox uses Claude-powered live translation that:

Auto-detects the merchant’s language on their first message.
Translates both directions — their message into your language, your reply into theirs.
Covers 25+ languages with zero configuration.

Your team keeps working in English. The merchant feels supported in their own language. Nobody copy-pastes anything.

The goal isn’t to speak every language. It’s to make every merchant feel like you do.

Pair it with a multilingual help center

Live translation handles conversations; a translated help center handles self-serve. Convot supports help-center articles in multiple languages on your own domain, searchable right inside the chat widget — so merchants get answers in their language before they ever open a conversation.

The takeaway

Global merchants are already installing your app. Supporting them in their language is one of the cheapest ways to cut churn and lift your rating — especially once it’s automatic.

Try Convot free and reply to any merchant, in any language, from day one.

How to support Shopify app merchants in any language