Japanese ecommerce site: EC-CUBE
Someone asked me what is the best way to build a basic Japanese ecommerce site for English speaking shop owner. So again I spent some hours and learned something new. All well known open source CMS like WordPress, Magento, Zen cart are developed in English, then translated into other languages. But there is a relatively new open source ecommerce CMS called EC-CUBE that is developed from scratch by Japanese programmers because they wanted a CMS that is customized to Japan ecommerce out of the box.
What sets EC-CUBE apart from other CMS for Japan market is it’s capability to handle mobile phones - specifically, DoCoMo, SoftBank and au. From young to old, everyone in Japan surf the Internet using their cell phone, and to many of them their phone is the main tool to surf the net.
In addition, from what I read, EC-CUBE is suitable for small ecommerce site, relatively inexpensive, and has easy-to-use back-end. The drawback - for non Japanese speaking businesses - is that the back-end interface is in Japanese. Of course, it is technically possible to turn it to English, but no one seems to have done it yet.