Cost effective Japanese ecommerce
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.
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.