Glopal: Boosting its customers' international and cross-border ecommerce with Google Cloud
About Glopal
Glopal, a Parisian startup founded in 2020 by Patrick Smarzynski and Benjamin Cohen, the creators of the famous marketplace localization service WebInterpret, employs around 100 people. Its one-of-a-kind solution for cross-border and omnichannel ecommerce has already attracted more than 300 customers, including major luxury brands.
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Contact usWith Google Cloud's managed services, Glopal's platform for cross-border and omnichannel ecommerce is supported by high-performance, secure, and auto-scalable infrastructure, meaning it's capable of real-time content localization of millions of pages.
Google Cloud results
- Time-to-market: Accelerated development (serverless managed services)
- Simplified use and upscaling thanks to automation
- Performance: Real-time content localization for tens of thousands of pages
- Highly secure platform to protect customers' sensitive data
Customers' international sales have tripled on average
Glopal, a Parisian startup founded in 2020, offers a SaaS solution for international ecommerce. With translation process automation, price conversion into local currencies, tax duty calculation, and shipping and payment options bolstered by AI, the platform translates and localizes online stores for more than 100 markets to enable brands to extend their catchment area internationally. The omnichannel solution also manages marketing campaigns and search engine optimization in the target language. By offering a one-of-a-kind solution on the cross-border ecommerce market, Glopal has already helped its customers triple their worldwide sales on average.
Accelerate development and protect customers
Its founders, Patrick Smarzynski and Benjamin Cohen, are not in uncharted territory: back in 2007 they launched WebInterpret, another solution designed to help e-merchants to grow in major marketplaces all over the world. "Following some customer requests, we realized that not everyone makes sales via marketplaces and that some major brands were looking for localization solutions for their own ecommerce sites," explains Patrick Smarzynski, Glopal CEO. "Rather than trying to develop a new ecommerce shopping platform, we decided to go design an innovative platform that connects to the brands ecosystem." The initiative has been well received: just one year after its creation, the startup supports over 300 customers in more than 100 countries, including major brands such as Babolat, Balmain, Chantelle, Dior, Loewe, and Printemps. It has also just completed a Series A fundraising round resulting in €20 million to strengthen its R&D and support its expansion into Europe and the US, two parts of the world where the company already has a small presence.
"We were looking for a solution capable of accelerating our development that offered the greatest possible efficiency in terms of administration and use. At the same time, our platform is used by prestigious brands who needed reassurance that the data passing through the platform is protected and treated confidentially. Google Cloud offered the best guarantees in this regard."
—Patrick Smarzynski, Glopal CEO and Co-founderWhen deciding how to develop and host its platform, Glopal did not immediately turn to Google Cloud. However, the company quickly migrated its solution so that it could benefit from advanced Google Cloud features, particularly in the area of managed services. "We were looking for a solution capable of accelerating our development that offered the greatest possible efficiency in terms of administration and use," explains Patrick Smarzynski. "At the same time, our platform is used by prestigious brands who needed reassurance that the data passing through the platform is protected and treated confidentially. Google Cloud offered the best guarantees in this regard."
Capitalize on managed services designed for high-performance and auto-scalable solutions
Glopal's needs in terms of technical infrastructure primarily revolve around processing and therefore computing resources. Some customers' catalogs contain tens of thousands of products. In addition, the websites can be quite fluid: some brands change their content every day by adding or removing products. This is why Glopal offers a real-time localization service: each transaction is unique and requires processing that is tailored to the shopper's location and cart. In addition to converting prices into the correct currency and calculating customs and shipping fees in real time, Glopal also has to generate a large amount of content on the fly. Patrick Smarzynski explains: "It is not enough for us to simply translate the content of a page; we also adapt the view to the country's cultural customs by changing the way information is presented, for example by writing from right to left or even from top to bottom, as the language dictates. Although a small amount of the localization is carried out in advance, we generate content on the fly for millions of products in around 100 markets. As latency isn't an option in ecommerce, we need a highly effective infrastructure."
The infrastructure Glopal chose to meet its requirements in terms of efficiency and automated operation, and to accelerate its development, is largely based on Google Cloud's serverless managed services. These include Cloud Functions, a Functions as a Service (FaaS) environment for quickly designing complex applications by interconnecting services; Cloud Run, which is used to execute internal and public APIs; the Pub/Sub service for orchestration; and Cloud Memorystore for Redis, which enables data to be stored.
"We localize content on the fly for millions of products in around 100 markets. As latency isn't an option in ecommerce, we need a highly effective infrastructure."
—Patrick Smarzynski, Glopal CEO and Co-founderIn regard to data, the company relies on the managed NoSQL database, Firestore in Datastore mode, which is designed for automatic scaling and high-performance solutions. The company also uses BigQuery to perform analyses and Cloud Storage for intermediate storage. At present, Glopal's AI models do not use Google Cloud's Data Cloud services, but it has not ruled out the possibility of exploiting the benefits of the Vertex AI models to enrich its platform in the future.
Finally, Glopal also relies heavily on Google Cloud's security tools and checks to protect its customers' content, particularly Secret Manager, a secure storage system for keys, passwords, credentials, and other sensitive data, and KMS, which is used to encrypt sensitive data.
Google Cloud: A trusted, local partner
Two years in, Patrick Smarzynski is delighted with this secure, high-performance infrastructure that has already attracted more than 300 customers. However, faced with a huge range of cloud services and numerous alternative architectures that they could have chosen, he readily acknowledges that Google Cloud's support played a significant role in the solution's design. "Google Cloud took the time to listen to us so that they could advise us on which tools and services best met our requirements. We are also kept regularly informed about new releases and have the opportunity to test them before they go live. This is all the more important as things change very quickly in the cloud. In fact, Google Cloud is not only an infrastructure provider, it's also a business partner that helps us to grow, in particular through services that allow us to offer new features more quickly, and therefore be more competitive in our market."
"Google Cloud is not only an infrastructure provider, it's also a business partner that helps us to grow, in particular through services that allow us to offer new features more quickly, and therefore be more competitive in our market."
—Patrick Smarzynski, Glopal CEO and Co-founderConfident in the reliability, security, and flexibility of its platform, Glopal has no worries about its future and is actively working on the next stages of its development so that it can better support brands to expand their ecommerce internationally. The global Google Cloud infrastructure is particularly well suited to helping Glopal attract new customers worldwide.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Glopal
Glopal, a Parisian startup founded in 2020 by Patrick Smarzynski and Benjamin Cohen, the creators of the famous marketplace localization service WebInterpret, employs around 100 people. Its one-of-a-kind solution for cross-border and omnichannel ecommerce has already attracted more than 300 customers, including major luxury brands.