Rochester Electronics China.

After establishing Rochester Electronics' e-commerce site as a strategically important sales channel, the next frontier was China — a market with its own language, its own payment infrastructure, its own logistics networks, and its own expectations for how a B2B storefront should behave. We adapted the existing Craft CMS and Craft Commerce installation into a true multisite architecture, with the Chinese and English sites running as distinct experiences rather than translated mirrors of each other. Every static string was translated, and the content models were decoupled so editors could shape the Chinese site independently — different products surfaced, different messaging, different navigation, all reflecting what Chinese buyers actually need to see. On top of that, we built a custom checkout process integrated with a Chinese freight forwarder and a local payment processor, so orders move through the same logistics and financial rails Chinese customers already trust. The result is a Rochester Electronics storefront that doesn't just speak Chinese — it operates as a Chinese e-commerce site.

Localizing the site meant more than running content through a translator. Every static string in the interface — button labels, form validations, error messages, navigation, the hundreds of small phrases users encounter without noticing — had to be translated and managed as part of the codebase, with a workflow that let Chinese-speaking editors review and refine translations over time rather than freezing them at launch.

The other half of the work happened off-screen. Craft's control panel is the day-to-day workspace for the team running the site, and a localized storefront is only as good as the editors maintaining it. We trained Rochester's Chinese staff to use the control panel — how to manage content, publish updates, handle products, and operate independently of the English-speaking team in Massachusetts. The goal was a site that didn't just appear Chinese to its customers, but was genuinely owned and operated by people working in the market it serves.

Payments in China don't run on the same rails as payments in the rest of the world. Chinese buyers expect to pay through the methods they already use every day, and those methods clear through Chinese banks and processors — not the Stripes and PayPals that anchor most Western e-commerce stacks. We rebuilt the checkout flow around a local payment processor that supports the payment options Chinese buyers actually use and keeps every transaction inside the country. The integration runs in two directions: a customer-facing handoff that transfers the buyer to the processor's hosted payment experience, and an API-level integration on the backend that receives payment results, reconciles them against the order, and moves the transaction forward without the customer ever leaving Rochester's flow for long. The result is a checkout that feels familiar to Chinese buyers and clears through the financial infrastructure they — and Chinese regulators — expect.