Japanese SEO,

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.

Nissan has a sports coupe called Datsun 280Z or Fair Lady Z. Fair
Lady Z was the original name given to the car when it was
developed in Japan. Someone probably advised Nissan that, to the
Americans, the name Fair Lady Z doesn’t match the car. So the company picked
a different name for the U.S. market.

This illustrates a potential pitfall in naming a product or service in another language. If
you are translating your website into another language, it is worth consulting someone to avoid this “Fair Lady” pitfall. (By the way, “Fair Lady Z” sounds fine to the Japanese people’s ears as a name of a sports coupe, mainly because it is in English. It is similar to any French words sounding sophisticated to the Americans. )

Depending on who you ask to translate, the same sentence can can be translated quite differently.

Here are 3 different translations of the same Japanese sentence by different translators. (C) is my translation.
A) In regards to the remarkable trouble you have caused the public on suspicion of ordinance infraction dealing with the prevention of misconduct using force, on 7/30/2007, the action was taken not to bring suit to prosecute.

B) As of July 30, 2007, I waived the indictment of the case that you were suspected to have violated the Ordinance against Disturbing the Peace.

C) On July 30, 2007, we decided to waive the indictment against you for the alleged violation of Ordinance for Safe and Secure Community Development.

(A) and (B) are examples of poor translation.