There is a specific meeting that happens in every multi-market retail organization, usually about three weeks before a launch that is not going to happen on time.The catalog is ready. Pricing is approved. The campaign creative is signed off. Legal has cleared the market. And then someone asks where the German product copy is, and the room goes quiet, because the answer is that it is with an agency, and the agency has it until the fourteenth, and after that it has to come back and be reconciled against a catalog that has changed twice since it left.Nobody in that room disagrees about the strategy. The decision to enter the market was made months ago and it was the right one. What is failing is not the thinking. It is the operational layer underneath the thinking, and it is failing in a way that rarely shows up on a leadership dashboard until it is already holding up a date.
The anatomy of the delay
It helps to say plainly what the process actually consists of, because from the executive floor it tends to be represented as a single line item called "translation," which makes it look like a cost problem. It is not primarily a cost problem. It is a sequencing problem.A merchandising team is managing thousands of SKUs across multiple locales. To localize any part of that, content is exported out of the commerce platform, sent to a vendor, worked on, sent back, checked, reconciled against whatever has changed in the interim, and republished. The translation itself is often the fastest part of that chain. The waiting and the reconciliation are where the weeks go.Meanwhile, the copy drifts. Without a shared set of rules governing tone and terminology, the same product family ends up described one way in one market and differently in another. That costs brand consistency, and because product copy is search-indexed, it costs organic performance in exactly the markets where you have least existing authority.And the vendors doing the work sit outside the commerce platform entirely. They have no view of the catalog structure, no awareness of what changed since the export, and no ability to publish. Every handoff is a boundary, and every boundary is a place where time is lost and errors are introduced.The part that matters most for anyone planning growth is the last one: this does not scale linearly. A process that is merely inefficient across two locales becomes a structural constraint across six. The real cost of a localization process is not the invoice from last year. It is the market entries that never got proposed, because the operational load looked too heavy to justify the upside.Why this gap stayed open
Retail has not been slow on AI. Adoption of generative AI in retail more than doubled in a single year, climbing from 11% to 24%, and nearly two-thirds of retail leaders report plans for consumer-facing implementations within the next 6 to 12 months. Ninety-eight percent say they will increase AI investment over the next eighteen months.But look at where that investment has gone. Conversational shopping. Recommendation engines. Review summarization. Service deflection. Nearly all of it sits at the customer-facing edge, where the impact is visible, measurable, and easy to build a business case around.Very little has gone to the operational layer behind the storefront, where the content that powers every one of those experiences is produced, reviewed, approved, and published.That prioritization was reasonable. It also produced a specific imbalance that is now becoming visible: increasingly intelligent front ends being fed by content operations that have not changed materially in a decade. The recommendation engine is sophisticated. The product description it is recommending took five weeks to exist in Portuguese.What has to change, in order
First, the work moves to the people who own the outcome.Localization decisions are merchandising decisions. Which attributes matter in this market. What register the brand takes here. Which terms are never translated because they are the brand. Whether the seasonal language that works in one region reads as strange in another.Those are judgment calls, and the people qualified to make them are the people who own the market. When every one of those calls has to be routed through a technical team or an external vendor, it stops being a decision and becomes a ticket. Tickets queue. Queues become weeks.Second, the work happens where the content lives.Content that leaves the platform has to come back, and coming back is the expensive part. Reconciliation is unglamorous, invisible, and consumes real merchandising capacity that could be going into assortment and campaign work. Removing the export and re-import cycle does not just save the time spent translating. It removes an entire class of work that only exists because the content left in the first place.Third, the review is governed, not just faster.This is the part that gets skipped, and skipping it is how organizations trade one problem for another. Speed without an audit trail is not an improvement. If nobody can answer who approved this copy, for this market, on what date, then the organization has accelerated its way into a compliance and brand-control problem it did not have before.Governance is not a brake on this. It is the thing that makes it safe to go faster.Where we sit
We built AllAi Translate to close this specific gap, and we built it inside Salesforce Commerce Cloud rather than beside it.It runs natively in Business Manager. There is no middleware, no connector, and no third-party portal to administer. Merchandisers select what to localize, whether that is a single product, a full category, a Page Designer layout, or a content page. Translations run on demand or on a schedule aligned to a launch date. Results come back in a side-by-side view with inline comments and quality checks, where a person approves, edits, or rejects each one, and an optional AI review step clears the routine cases so human attention goes where it matters. Approved copy applies directly to SFCC.Tone of voice, glossary terms, and translation rules are configured once, by resource type and by site, so brand language holds as markets are added instead of being re-argued in each one. And every action is recorded: what was generated, what was approved or rejected, by whom, and when. Configured once does not mean fixed. Rules can be revised and refined whenever the brand language changes or a market needs an exception, so the configuration is a setting you keep tuning rather than a decision you are locked into.The tool does not take human judgment out of localization. It takes out the waiting, the handoffs, and the reconciliation that currently surround that judgment.If your next market entry is being scheduled around a translation cycle rather than a commercial decision, that is worth a closer look.Contact us to see how AllAi Translate works inside Business Manager.Frequently Asked Questions
What causes delays in launching a product catalog in a new language?The delay usually comes from the localization workflow rather than the translation itself. Product content is exported from the commerce platform, sent to an external vendor, returned, and then reconciled against a catalog that has changed in the interim before it can be republished. Manual translation workflows of this kind slow time to market by weeks.Why does localization cost increase faster than the number of markets?Each additional market multiplies the localization workload rather than adding to it. A new locale compounds against every content type, every campaign cycle, and every catalog change already in progress, so a process that is manageable across two markets can become a structural constraint across six.How does inconsistent product copy affect search performance?Product content is indexed by search engines, so inconsistent copy across locales weakens both brand voice and organic search performance. The effect is most pronounced in newly entered markets, where a retailer has the least established domain authority.Why is it a problem when translation vendors work outside the commerce platform?Translation agencies typically operate disconnected from Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which means they have no view of catalog structure and no ability to publish. Every export and re-import is a handoff, and the reconciliation work on the return leg consumes merchandising capacity that would otherwise go to assortment and campaign work.How do you translate product content in Salesforce Commerce Cloud?Product content in Salesforce Commerce Cloud can be translated using a tool that runs natively inside Business Manager, which avoids exporting content to an external vendor. AllAi Translate, built by OSF Digital, operates inside Business Manager with no middleware, connectors, or third-party portals, allowing merchandisers to translate product names, descriptions, and metadata and publish approved results directly to Salesforce Commerce Cloud.What is AllAi Translate?AllAi Translate is an AI translation tool for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, built by OSF Digital. It runs natively inside SFCC Business Manager and allows merchandising teams to translate product catalogs and content, review translations side by side, and apply approved translations directly to Salesforce Commerce Cloud.Does AllAi Translate require middleware or a connector?No. AllAi Translate runs natively inside Salesforce Commerce Cloud Business Manager, with no middleware, connectors, or third-party portals to manage.What content types can AllAi Translate translate?AllAi Translate translates individual products, full categories, Page Designer content, and content pages. At the field level it handles product names, descriptions, and metadata in a single step. Users select which attributes are translated for each resource type and each site.How many languages does AllAi Translate support?AllAi Translate supports 100 or more languages. Results vary depending on the AI model used and the languages enabled on the site.Do humans review translations in AllAi Translate?Yes. Translations appear in a side-by-side view where a user approves, edits, or rejects each one, with inline comments and quality checks available during review. An optional AI review step handles validation on routine cases to reduce repetitive review effort. Human linguistic review by a professional translator is not included in the license and is available on request from OSF Digital.How does AllAi Translate maintain brand voice across markets?AllAi Translate holds tone of voice, glossary terms, and translation rules as configuration set by resource type and by site. This means brand language is applied as a rule across every market rather than being restated to a vendor with each new locale, and translation behavior can be adapted to local market needs while brand consistency is maintained.Does AllAi Translate require developer involvement?No. AllAi Translate is built for business users and requires no developer involvement to run translations, configure rules, or publish. OSF Digital handles administrative tasks.Can translations be scheduled in advance?Yes. Translations in AllAi Translate run on demand or on a schedule set for a future date and time, which supports planned launches, seasonal campaigns, and market rollouts.Can you use your own AI model with AllAi Translate?Yes. AllAi Translate supports Bring Your Own LLM, allowing an organization to connect its preferred AI provider and manage its own API keys. OSF Digital also offers a plan in which the AI and API are hosted and managed by OSF Digital.How is translation activity audited in AllAi Translate?AllAi Translate records when each translation was generated, approved, or rejected, and which user performed each approval or rejection action. AI token consumption is reported across selected time periods. Role-based permissions and full audit logs apply throughout.Who is AllAi Translate built for?AllAi Translate is built for merchandising and ecommerce operations teams running Salesforce Commerce Cloud storefronts across multiple locales. Salesforce Commerce Cloud administrators use it to manage licensing, model access, governance, and AI cost visibility.Author: Adele Delsaux, Project Manager, Commerce & Performance, OSF Digital
Adele Delsaux is an AI Product Owner at OSF Digital, responsible for defining and prioritizing the product roadmap for OSF's AI tooling, translating user needs into requirements, and working with development and UX teams to ship them. She has spent over seven years across Salesforce Commerce Cloud delivery at OSF as a project manager and business analyst, leading discovery workshops, scoping client solutions, and running omnichannel implementations end to end. Before that she managed storefront operations directly, covering site navigation, category management, product assortment, and merchandising strategy.
Contact: Kateryna Melkomukova
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