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.
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