E-Commerce to Japan, Capitalize on the YEN

A lot of our work at Alethia is E-Commerce. I love building E-Commerce sites and as I sit here and watch the USD crash compared to the Yen. I can’t help but think, more than anytime in the last 15 years or more, with the rate at 79 ~ 81 yen to the USD, just last year the rate was around 115 ~ 120, has never has there been a better time to sell to Japan online.

Now, while the world is taking a hit to almost every kind of market, there is a some hope if you can open your product up to Japan. Japan is being hit just as hard as any other market in the world, the only difference is, that most people in Japan live in family groups. A decent amount of the population have full-time jobs but share bills as a house hold and the younger generations having little to no housing or utilities bills if they do live inside their family group.

They way I see it, for Americans, there has never been a better time to open your market up to the Japanese market. With Americans having some of the best options to handle transactions online, Pay-Pal websites payment pro handles Japanese currency and Japanese language input. Japanese are looking more and more to the Internet for deals. And the yen has never been stronger in many of the lives of the young, why would you not want to? With Open Source tools like Ubercart to build CMS E-Commerce applications that are rich and can be developed to answer most of the questions that your customers would have in their language, costs are low. So if you have the product that has any desire to Japanese, then you can capitalize on this low USD to YEN and instead of taking a hit in this economy, you can seize the opprotunity! Your products are naturally on sale every time the Yen gets stronger. Of course there is the natural flow of economics, where world rates will effect your costs to produce goods, your most likely not going to see this hit right away, and you could time the buying of your raw goods to actually gain from this fact, buying when things are low. If done right, with the right products, you could really cash in on the rate.

I would say now, is such a great time to open your mind up to selling to Japan online. The beauty of a site done right is that you have a sales associate that works one on one with the customer 24 hours, 365 days a week and has little salary that it needs. Shipping is easy when it comes to shipping from outside Japan to inside of Japan, one rate to any location inside of Japan. Japanese customers are some of the easiest customers to deal with in the world, they also believe you get what you pay for. So, I don’t know how to say it anymore, while things are hard in the states and the world, they could be great for you if you are open to the idea of Japan and E-Commerce.