Here are questions exactly as they land in a Moroccan shop's inbox.
Key point
- What your search engine understands, and what it does not
- Why written Darija is a special case
- What language changes for sales
- What you can do right now, without changing tools
- 3andkom chi zrbiya dyal sof ?
- bghit chi haja l bard f dar
- Bch'hal l'sweat ?
- je veux des babuch
- une teiere svp
- du savn noir
- vous avez des habits ?
- un cadeau pour un collègue
Eight questions. Eight buyers. Now type each of those phrases into your own shop's search box and watch what comes back.
In most cases: nothing.
What your search engine understands, and what it does not
An online shop's search works by matching words. You have a product called “Beni Ouarain wool rug”. The engine can find it if the buyer writes “rug”, “Beni Ouarain” or “wool”.
It does not find it if the buyer writes:
The word in Darija. “Zrbiya” and “sof” mean rug and wool, but those words appear nowhere in your catalogue.
The word with a typo. “Tapi”, “beni warain”, “teiere”, “babuch”, “savn”: each of these is missing a letter or two, and that is enough for it to match nothing.
An intention, not a product. “Bghit chi haja l bard f dar” means “I want something for the cold at home”. Not one word of that sentence appears on a product page. Yet the buyer is looking for precisely your wool rug, or your throw, or your heater.
A category you did not name that way. “Do you have clothes?” when your categories are called “T-shirts” and “Sweatshirts”. “Any notebooks?” when the product is called “Notepad”.
Each of these failures is a sale that does not happen, and you never see it: the buyer does not write to tell you the search returned nothing, they close the tab.
Why written Darija is a special case
It is not only a vocabulary problem. Darija has one characteristic that complicates everything: it has no stable spelling.
The Moroccan researchers who built DarijaBERT, the first language model dedicated to the Moroccan dialect, put it precisely: Darija was until recently a purely oral language, it acquired a written form only lately, and it lacks standardisation, with no established grammatical or syntactic rules.
In practice, that means the same word is written several ways depending on the person, the keyboard and the mood. On top of that comes Arabizi, the habit of writing Arabic in Latin letters using digits for sounds that do not exist in French: 3 for ع, 7 for ح, 9 for ق, 2 for the hamza. “3andkom” and “andkoum” are the same word.
And above all that, switching languages inside a single sentence: “Bch'hal l'sweat?” mixes Darija, a French article and an English word. That is not a mistake, it is the normal way of speaking here.
A search engine designed for French has no chance against that. And it must be said: it is not the buyer's fault. That is how people write on a phone keyboard, at 10 pm, with one hand.
What language changes for sales
There is little Moroccan data on the link between language and conversion, and we will not pretend to have any. What we know comes from elsewhere.
A CSA Research survey conducted in 2020 among 8,709 consumers in 29 countries found that 76% of online shoppers prefer to buy a product with information in their own language, and that 40% will never buy from a site in another language. It is an international study, not a Moroccan one, and it should be read as such. But it measures something universal: people do not commit their money in a language they are not comfortable in.
In Morocco the question does not arise in those terms, since almost everyone reads French. It arises differently: the buyer writes in Darija. If they have to rephrase their question in correct French to be understood by your site, you have just asked them for an effort at the exact moment they were hesitating.
What you can do right now, without changing tools
Enrich your product pages with your customers' words. Go back through your last hundred messages. Note the words that recur: zrbiya, sof, babouche, tajine, bch'hal. Add them to your product descriptions, or to a keyword field if your platform offers one. Your search engine will find them.
Name your categories the way your customers name them. “Clothes” alongside “Ready-to-wear”. “Notebooks” alongside “Stationery”. Nobody will hold being understandable against you.
Answer the question asked, in the language it was asked in. If the buyer writes in Darija, answer in Darija or in plain French, not in administrative French.
Look at what your search engine fails to find. Most platforms log internal searches that returned no result. It is probably the most profitable page in your dashboard, and the least consulted.
And what a tool should be able to do
If you ever consider equipping your shop, here are the three capabilities to demand, in this order.
Tolerate the typo. A search that fails on “teiere” is not a search, it is a spelling test.
Understand meaning, not only words. “Something for the cold at home” must bring back the wool rug. That requires a search that connects intentions to products, not only character strings.
Know Darija, including written in Latin letters and digits. That is half your messages. A tool that does not understand it does not understand half your customers.
There are now serious Moroccan resources in this field, built by researchers from here: DarijaBERT, the Darija Open Dataset, the work of AtlasIA. Darija is no longer a language machines ignore. So there is no longer any reason for your shop to keep ignoring it.
Where Cosensible fits in
Conseilor
At Cosensible we build Conseilor, an assistant that understands Darija, typos and questions asked without the exact product name, and that answers from the merchant's real catalogue.
Discover Conseilor
