Q1. Do Japanese users use credit card for online purchases?
A. Yes. Although it was not the case five years ago, currently credit cards are one of the most common ways for paying online in Japan. The English Daily Japan Times last year reported, "Rising numbers of Japanese are online: Japan's Information and Communications White Paper reported that there were about 79 million Internet users at the end of 2004, an increase of nearly 100 percent in five years. They like to shop. According to a government survey, Japan's business-to-business e-commerce grew 33 percent in 2004 from the previous year to reach 102.7 trillion yen. Business-to-consumer e-commerce expanded 28 percent to 5.6 trillion, yen and the consumer-to-consumer e-commerce market for Internet auctions last year reached 784 billion yen. Nearly two-thirds of Internet users use credit cards to settle transactions."
Q2. Do most Japanese web users have broadband connections?
A. According to Eurotechnology.com, broadband internet access in Japan is among the cheapest in the world, and broadband Internet access (mainly ADSL) is expected to approach 75% penetration in 2006. Here are current user estimates for just a few countries:
* USA: 38 million broadband users
* Japan: 33.8 million broadband users
* Germany: 26.5 million broadband users
* UK: 21 million broadband users
* Italy: 15.5 million broadband users
Q3. How much would it cost to have a website targeted toward the Japanese market?
A. Prices vary from project to project. Please
contact us to give you a quote. We will send you a check list about your target market, your competitors, your differentiation from competitors, business objectives in terms of "success metrics" (i.e., how you will measure success), examples of other websites with design aspects you may want on your website, features and functions you would like to include, and so on.
Q4. Do you provide support for double-byte Japanese character issues?
A. Yes. We have extensive experience in dealing with Japanese characters including hiragana, katakana, and kanji. We property set language coding on your web pages, system, and database.
Q5. Do you provide hosting plan for Japanese website?
A. Yes. We have hosting plans specifically designed for websites in Japanese. With our hosting, all server and database settings are adjusted for Japanese encoded websites.
Q6. Do you help us communicate with Japanese users?
A. Yes. We provide
Japanese customer support service. We translate emails from your Japanese users into English and pass them to you. You just need to reply to those emails in English. Then, we translate your messages into Japanese. In most cases, the process takes within 24 business hours and the best part is, it would be cheaper than hiring an in-house Japanese customer support agent.
