Going Global Just Got Easier

Products representing American pop culture, such as designer jeans, designer handbags, and baseball caps and coffee mugs with logos, are hugely popular in Japan. They can''t get their hands on this stuff fast enough. E-tailers that would love to take advantage of the global potential of the Net''s far reaches, and to serve the Japanese market well, need to provide a site in the proper language of their target market. For example, if you want to tap into Japan''s insatiable appetite for American goods, you need to have product descriptions in Japanese, include the right cultural references, and last but not least, you must provide Japanese-language customer service and pre-sales support.

So many obstacles, on the Web site side alone, make the daunting fulfillment issues - shipping, customs, tariffs, returns - seem trivial by comparison.

If you can handle the fulfillment issues, there''s a site that will handle the front-end for you: US-Style.com. A sales and distribution channel, US-Style.com works with e-tailers, manufacturers and wholesale distributors who wish to sell products to the growing global online markets. Currently, they''re focused on Japan.

Unless your Japanese is pretty good, you may not get much out of your initial visit to their site, since it''s truly designed for the Japanese marketplace first and foremost. When you first arrive, you''ll be prompted to load the proper character set to have the characters render properly. (It''s not a dual-language site.) They know who their audience is and they''ve built their site expressly for them.

The idea of companies that will translate your site into whatever language you want isn''t new at all. I remember seeing ads for companies offering translation services back in 1994. What''s new about US-Style.com, which went live in October 1999, is that they provide not only translation, but cultural relevance (they actually re-write your product descriptions to make them more compelling to the Japanese market). They also handle inbound customer service inquiries in Japanese, translate them to English and forward to you, then translate your outbound customer service replies back into Japanese before forwarding them to the customers.

Maxwell Thomas, CEO & co-founder of US-Style.com, is still looking for merchants to take into the Japanese marketplace: "To be realistic, I think we have 5% of the products that we can offer and that we should offer." If the products you sell fall into the categories of products that sell well, this may well be your turn-key solution to breaking into the lucrative Japanese market.

Will It Work For You?
What kinds of things are in high demand in the Japanese marketplace? In addition to the products listed above, cosmetics, health & beauty, including aromatherapy, pet care products, and trendy apparel. Even if US-Style is already selling a product by another retailer, they''ll still consider carrying yours on their site. "We try to avoid exclusivity because it''s only limiting to the customer." What do they not need? Electronics, computers, cell phones, silk scarves.

US-Style also monitors sales of your products through their sites and takes down products that they have reason to believe you can''t ship fast enough, by monitoring your inventory. They don''t want their own customers to be dissatisfied, so they keep you from getting in over your head.

Rather than taking a listing feed of all the products in your database, and replicating your entire site, they''ll select the products they think will do best in Japan, and begin with those.

What''s the timeframe for "turning Japanese?" Maxwell Thomas replies, "We could have something up in four to six weeks."

Shipping, Customs, and Tariffs
US-Style.com will put you in touch with their shipping agents. They know the rules and will help you ship products that won''t incur tariffs. Most products under $100 don''t incur tariffs if they''re imported for personal use, but the rules are complex. Ultimately, you will handle these fulfillment issues, but US-Style.com''s knowledgeable staff will even help you pick tariff-free products for your Japanese-language site.

As ecommerce continues to expand, it''s easy to see how e-businesses will face technical, logistical, and organizational challenges as they try to develop global Internet strategies that incorporate multilingual ecommerce sites. Successful global strategies will involve thinking locally in each of the individual markets - i.e the Japanese sites. Back in 1998, Forrester Research wrote a report titled "Instant Global," but they couldn''t possibly have envisioned something as turn-key as this.

Alexis D. Gutzman is an E-commerce Technology Author and Consultant and author of The HTML 4 Bible, FrontPage 2000 Answers!, and ColdFusion 4 for Dummies. She can be reached at agutzman@internet.com