Why Loqua
Every translation app for Shopify runs on Google. We don't.
The headline AI features on every other translation app are a thin metered layer over Google Translate. The math forces the fallback. Here's why that matters.
The hidden pricing math
Take Transcy, the "featured" translation app on the Shopify App Store. Their "most popular" tier is $99 per month. It includes 1,000 AI translations.
A modest D2C store with 75 SKUs across five European locales needs between 5,500 and 10,000 AI translations to ship an accurate first pass. That's products, collections, menus, theme strings, pages, metafields, and SEO tags multiplied out by locale.
On Transcy's $99 tier, you cover about 12% of what you actually need. The other 88% defaults to Google Translate. That isn't a bug or a temporary limitation. It's the pricing model.
Why Google Translate ships "Les Fans"
Google Translate is a generic engine. It has no idea your store sells fans the appliance, not fans the followers. So in French, your mega menu becomes "Les Fans" instead of "Les Ventilateurs." Your product titles drift. Your category pages start to feel foreign in a way that makes shoppers bounce.
The fix is not "more AI tokens." It's removing the metering entirely, and giving every translation the brand context it needs: glossary, voice profile, prior translations of similar items, and the product category itself.
That's what Loqua does. Every translation passes through Claude with the full brand context. There is no Google fallback because there are no metered AI tokens running out.
What all-LLM actually gives you
When you set up Loqua, you give us three things. A brand voice profile (tone, formality, register). A glossary of terms that must translate a specific way. And a set of target locales.
Every string in your store, from product titles down to delivery method descriptions, then runs through Claude with that context attached. Translations get a confidence score. High-confidence translations publish automatically. Anything Claude is unsure about, or anything that conflicts with your glossary, lands in a review queue for human approval. Once approved, that translation enters the translation memory and never has to be regenerated.
Identical or near-identical source content never re-translates. When you edit a product title, only the changed strings re-translate, across every active locale. The accuracy compounds. The cost amortises.