Case Study: Rakuten achieves a 16% higher conversion rate and ~$83K revenue boost with Lionbridge human translation

How Human Translation Boosted Rakuten’s Conversion Rates

Rakuten ran an experiment to see whether human or machine translation would convert better for ecommerce listings and engaged Lionbridge (formerly Gengo) to provide human translation via its crowdsourced platform and API. The challenge was to improve conversion on 250 product listings by comparing human-translated content against machine translation.

Lionbridge translated all 250 listings in under 48 hours, and the human-translated pages lifted conversion rate from 4.21% to 4.89% (+16%), increasing gross revenue per 100,000 visitors from $526,250 to $611,250 — an $85,000 gain. At about $7.25 per listing (total setup $1,812.50), the net revenue boost was roughly $83,188, demonstrating Lionbridge’s fast, affordable, high-impact solution.

Rakuten