If you want to start online search marketing for Japanese customers and you want to minimize cost for hiring Japanese middlemen, you have only two choices:
- Google adWords
- Yahoo! Japan Listing Advertisement (called Yahoo Search Marketing here in US)
Both services are exactly like US counterparts. Their administrative screens are available in English so you just need to have somebody create an advertisement and keywords in Japanese and you can manage the rest like starting and stopping ads by yourself.
However, Yahoo Japan has recently made almost impossible for people outside Japan to advertise. According to this, they decided to suspend all VISA and MasterCard credit cards which have been issued outside Japan, starting February 1, 2010.
I understand that they’re doing this because of lots of fraud credit cards issued outside Japan but if you have only credit cards issued in US, the only choice to pay is a bank wire transfer which costs a lot for the handling fee.
Unlike here, Yahoo is still strong in Japan in terms of the search market share and auction. So, you don’t want to miss their advertising service but now it’s impossible.
Fortunately, Google doesn’t have that kind of restriction so now adWords is the only game for us.
Last week, Amazon has announced that they opened the data center in Asia Pacific Region in Singapore.
This has nothing to do with Amazon shopping mall as you know. Although it’s run by the same company, Amazon has been providing hosting, data storage and other web services so called “Cloud services” to users.
They now have the four locations you can choose to host your website:
- US North Virginia
- US North California
- EU Ireland
- APAC Singapore
This is very important if you target people in Asia because it reduces the latency I discussed here to half compared to hosting your website in the US West Coast area.
Please see more about this here.
The news like “Fiber optic ocean cable between US and Aisa” is very promising to improve the latency between US and Japan.
However, delivering the image or video contents to Japanese customers in Japan from US still takes more time.
For example, my client has a Japanese site which has been hosted at a data center in downtown, Los Angeles. As he has recently started using bigger size of product images and more graphics packed web page, his website has started to crawl for all of his Japanese customers.
Having his site hosted in US has a big advantage in terms of the cost. When I checked a year ago, it would cost more than three times to host his dedicated server in Japan. However, the latency is a problem. For example, when I measured the download time of 90KB image in Tokyo, Japan from both Osaka and Los Angeles, there was almost one second difference between them. It’s huge especially when the average size of a web page in his site exceed 1 MB.
Because of the hosting cost, moving his entire machine to Japan wasn’t a solution. So, we rent a fairly inexpensive shared hosting site in Osaka, Japan and we moved only images to the site and had it deliver the images from there.
Immediately, it was a great success. his customers are happy to get the images downloaded faster and now that all the images are delivered from Japan, it reduced the traffic to the US machine to about half and improved the web performance overall.
I love BigCartel.
I love it because it’s so simple to create your online shop to sell your stuff. Get your uniquely designed logo and background images and then post the pictures of your stuff. Then presto! You are now selling your products online and it looks so hip!
I also love it because their “Platinum” service costs only $9.99 for a month and no sales commission. All you need to have is your PayPal account.
Finally, I love it because you can convert it to a Japanese shop and sell your stuff in Japanese currency.
Here is what a BigCartel support says:
Since we don’t officially support Japanese characters at this time,
there will likely be a few things you need to tweak in order to get it
to work properly. As you’ve found, our product names require at least
1 alphanumeric character, so other stores have simply added a “1″ (or
any letter or number) to the end of their product name.With our Platinum and Diamond plans you have full access to the HTML
and CSS in your shop. From there you should be able to use Japanese
characters in the text, as well as embed any images that display
Japanese characters.
Here is a real example:
My client already has an English site:
http://defcity.bigcartel.com/
and he wanted to have a Japanese site and we did the conversion:
http://defcityjp.bigcartel.com/
Well, I know this is not for everybody. There are restrictions and problems if you want more functionality for your shopping cart. But, BigCartel has really lowered the hurdle to sell your products to Japanese customers!
It’s not new for US online shops to sell products to Japan. You hire a Japanese designer or programmer to translate and create a online shop as if it’s a Japanese store.
But, there is still a BIG difference from a truly Japanese store. You’re selling the products in US dollars. It’s easy for sellers but it’s NOT for Japanese customers. The exchange rate changes daily basis. It’s hard for Japanese customers to calculate what they would pay eventually. They often find out in their bank statement after they’ve been charged. How would you feel if you were a Japanese customer?
So, you should sell in Japanese Yen if possible. In the past, there were only few card gateway companies that provided the solution and those were charging very high commission rate. But, now PayPal provides the option. Their commission rate is very close to selling in US dollars. Please checkout the Fee in this screen:
Please check here for the up-to-date information.
I’ve known it for a long time that PayPal provided the Japanese payment page but it’s recent I was able to duplicate the Japanese PayPal checkout page with my English version of web browser such as IE.
The trick is your browser needs to let PayPal know your language preference. To do that, you need to add Japanese to your browser’s Language options. If it’s IE, you can get to the option:
Tools -> Internet Options -> General
Click the “Language” button:
And, this is what you would see at the PayPal checkout:
