Localising a store is not localising a catalogue. The product pages are the visible part and usually the easy part, because they are structured and repetitive. What takes the time is everything the customer meets between the product and the confirmation email: sizes, currency, shipping terms, tax wording, returns, the checkout labels and the transactional emails, most of which live outside the CMS in places nobody thinks to count.
The four layers of a store, and which are translated
The catalogue, the navigation and category pages, the checkout flow, and the transactional emails. Translating the first two and stopping is the classic half-done job: a shopper reads a product page in Spanish, adds it to a basket labelled in English and receives a confirmation in English. Each layer lives in a different system and often needs a different route to translate it.
The parts that are not language at all
Currency and its formatting, sizes and units, address formats, phone formats, tax and duty wording, and the delivery promise, which is genuinely different per market rather than a translation of the same sentence. These are the changes that make a store feel local, and none of them come out of a translation memory.
Counting the words honestly
Take the product template's words once, not once per product, then add the variable fields multiplied by the products you actually list in that market. Most stores do not translate the whole catalogue at first: they translate the categories that sell there. That decision changes the word count more than anything else, and the scope sheet on this site is where to make it.
What the tags have to do with it
A store's URL structure usually carries both a language and a currency, which produces near-duplicate URLs that need canonicals as well as hreflang. Getting that pair right is worth more to a store than another translated category, because the wrong version ranking in a market means the right one never gets seen.
Questions people ask about ecommerce localization
Do we have to translate the whole catalogue?
No, and most stores should not start there. Translate the categories that sell in that market, and the flow around them, before the long tail.
Is currency part of localisation?
Yes, and so are sizes, address formats and the delivery promise. They are not translation, which is why they get missed.
What about the checkout?
It is usually the hardest part because the labels live in the platform rather than the CMS. Check what your platform actually supports before you promise a launch date.