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