Best practices on setting up multi country Magento store

[seanmccauley]

We run Magento and we're in the process of redesigning our site. We want the site to have separate storefronts for different countries, however we won't have the site language translated initially. We're thinking we'll use the Magento multi-store feature and have sites like /fr, /de  /en-us, /en-au, etc.

Is the best practice to use hreflang and for the non-english stores which haven't yet been translated? For example set them as, for French users:

Essentially saying, the page is aimed at French people, but is in English.

The separate storefronts will have things like currency and tax localised to each country and will gradually be getting translated, especially the more generic stuff like "Add to Cart", "Checkout" etc.

Or, should it be targeted at French language and country, despite not all being translated into French?

Or is there a better way to do this?

[gfiorelli1]

Mmm...

if your site has not been translated yet, the correct should be rel="alternate" hreflang="en-FR", but - yes - that would mean that people searching in French from France won't see the /fr subfolder.

On the other hand, using as hreflang "fr-FR" would not be correct.

My best suggestion, in cases like this, is using the hrelang="x-default", where the href is the country selector page, so that people searching in French from France will be pointed to the selector page and, from there being able to click on the french version link.

Another suggestion is to create personalized message telling the French people entering in the site but seeing it is in English that the site is going to be soon translated in their language, but that the products and services are already available for the French market, so inviting them to not bounce back, which should be the most common reaction the users can have.