Japanese SEO,

PayPal offers 3 payment solutions. If you offer custom products and services - like proofreading and editing service and custom-made surfboards - then Email Payment is for you. If you sell pre-priced products, then Website Payments Standard or Express Checkout. If PayPal is the only payment method for your website, Website Payments Standard. Otherwise, Express Checkout. The comparison chart is here.

For Website Payments Standard and Express Checkout, you probably want to check through some options at your PayPal account’s “profile” > “Selling Preferences”.

PayPal is probably the best payment solution for e-commerce business owners who want to sell to Japan from other countries.  The merits include:

• PayPal accepts JCB.
• No set-up fees.  No monthly fees.
• Low transaction fees: 1.9% - 2.9% + $0.30 USD per transaction
• Fast and easy set-up.
• Buyers can pay with their credit card without having PayPal account .
• Buyers do not need to inform their credit card number to the seller.
• PayPal supports multiple currencies.

PayPal’s Japan site showing JCB logo here:

A drawback is that PayPal is not as widely used in Japan as in the US.  In particular, the fact that having PayPal account is not required to use the service does not seem to be known well.  Well, I did not know it until recrently, and I see confirming statements on the net.  So it would probably be a good idea to make sure the fact is clearly stated on your website where customers are about to start buying process.

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.

Developing a fully automated Japanese/English bilingual ecommerce site is very complicated and costly.  For small or medium size businesses, there is a practical alternative.  It is to leave the shopping cart just in English but provide A) a comprehensive shopping guide section customized for the Japanese shoppers written in Japanese, and B) Japanese customer service to answer email inquiries in Japanese.

Here are two examples.

• http://www.hannaandersson.com
• http://www.sigzane.com

Let’s look at Hanna Andersson’s.  It’s one of the best I have seen.
Their Japanese shopping guide includes:

• About Hanna Andersson
• About Hanna’s fabric
• Privacy policy / security
• Return policy
• Back order
• Shipping and custom
• Clothing size charts
• Shoes size charts
• Order status (input order number)
• Online shopping guide
• Error messages
• Payment method
• Q&A
• Free catalog

Both of the sites listed above have a Japanese speaking customer service person who can answer email inquiries in Japanese.  This is a huge plus.  Imagine that you are trying to shop at a site written in Japanese.  If you can write email to them in English, wouldn’t that make you feel much more comfortable to putting your credit number down?  It is not necessary to hire a part-time person for this if you are just testing out the Japan market.  You can outsource it to an email translation service.  We can arrange this for you, so please inquire about it.

Shopping guide and customer service in Japanese (or in another language) are good things to have even if your site is equipped with bilingual shopping cart.  If you can afford it, that would be ideal.  The point here is that with a good shopping guide and customer service in Japanese, a majority of your prospective Japanese customers will be fine in shopping at your site, and you can save by not developing and running a bilingual shopping cart.

Someone asked me which CMS is best to build a basic Japanese / English bilingual ecommerce site that is relatively small in size of up to 50 products or so.  This person was inclined to use Joomla! .  WordPres, Magento, Drupal are among the possible options.

I spent hours researching on the net, only to find that there seems to be no definite answer at this point.  Joomla! does seems to be favored, if you have to pick one.  What surprised me is that I could not find ANY website developer who has experience in building J/E bilingual ecommerce site with Joomla!  I inquired some website developers, but none of them have.  There are some who develop such sites using their own custom made CMS, but I prefer open source CMS because with custom (not open source) CMS, you are at the mercy of the developer in upgrades, cost and support.

Our web design parter, Paul at Tokyo Web Designs says, “Ecommerce is a tremendously complex area, and rather than re-invent the wheel, my goal is to find out which open source platform works best and configure/customize that to match my project requirements.  So far I haven’t found one that I am really satisfied with.”

Maybe it is too early and we don’t have a winner yet for J/E bilingual ecommerce CMS.  I will keep my eyes on this.

If you want to sell your products or service to the people in Japan, and want them to fill in their names and addresss in your form, you might want to know the following.

Address is written from largest units to smallest units of areas, with the addressee’s name last of all. For example:
〒100-8799
東京都千代田区丸の内2丁目7番2号
田中　一夫

〒100-8799
Tokyo-to Chiyoda-ku Marunouchi 2-7-2
Tanaka Kazuo

Most people in Japan know to write it in reverse order when writing in English alphabet.

Kazuo Tanaka
2-7-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo 100-8799

Some addresses are quite long:

• Azachuodai 21-14, Oaza-ottozawa, Okuma-machi, Hutaba-gun, Fukushima 979-1301
• Oaza-hamanomiya 361-1, Nachikatsuura-cho, Higashimuro-gun, Wakayama 649-5314
• Osaka-cho 384, Karasuma-dori-Gojo-sagaru, Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto-shi, Kyoto 600-8418

That being said, I think it is probably the best to keep your form simple and if possible, provide a sample of how to fill in.  You should ask to use English alphabet if no sample is provided.  Include:

• (full) name 氏名
• address (apartment /building name, room number)　住所（マンション・アパート名・部屋番号）
• address (street name and number)　住所（町名・番地）
• address (city, ward)　住所（市町村郡）
• prefecture　都道府県
• postal code　郵便番号

If you wish to sell your products to Japan via your online shop, I suggest you to look into accepting JCB card.

JCB is a Japan based credit card.  Although not well known outside the country, it is the most widely accepted credit card in the country.  Some consumers in Japan – particularly the younger ones who haven’t traveled much abroad - only own JCB card.

To cater to this population, many airlines and hotels accept the card, and so do the retailers in tourist destinations such as Hawaii and Korea where the Japanese love to travel to.

wikipedia entry for JCB card

Another payment method that you might want to consider is money order issued by Japan Post Bank.  Established in 2007 as a result of privatization of government owned Japan Post, Japan Post Bank  is the largest bank in Japan and one of the largest in the world in terms of total assets.

Japan Post Bank’s money order can be made either to your bank account or street address.  Bank account maybe a better choice because it’s faster (4-6 days vs. 5-12 days estimated) and it involves no fee on your end.  With the money order made to your street address, on the other hand, you might have to pay a fee when depositing the money order, depending on your bank.

The drawback of money order made to your bank account is that if you don’t want to post your bank account number on your website, you need to correspond it to your customer.

Weak dollar aids exports.  One of our clients who manufactures and sells surfboards has been seeing increased sales from Japan as yen remains strong against dollar.  If you are an online retailer and haven’t shipped your products to overseas, here are some links that might interest you:

U.S. Postal Service – Postage Calculator

FedEx – International Shipping Rate calculator

Amazon.com’s information page on “Shipping rates and times to Japan”

It appears that USPS is widely used for shipping a variety of consumer products.  The surfboard company mentioned above, however, uses Sagawa Express and Yamato Transport for shipping their surfboards because surfboards are easily damaged during shipping if not packaged well, and the manufacturer found Sagawa and Yamato provide the best service.

Sagawa Express

Yamato Transport U.S.A.