Ebay To Offer J->E Translation Service For Sellers

[Mulboyne]

Reuters: EBay to start Japanese language services
Online auctioneer eBay Inc will introduce Japanese language services for sellers on Wednesday as it tries to lure Japanese products, the financial daily Nikkei said in its Tuesday edition. The paper said a translation service will provide Japanese sellers with English versions of their product descriptions within a day at rates of 700 yen ($7.20) for up to 100 Japanese characters and 1,200 yen for up to 200. "The cost will be less than half that of conventional services," Nikkei said. The service will also provide translations to Japanese from English to allow sellers to handle questions from buyers, Nikkei said. It said explanations on how to list a product will be available in Japanese on a new web site. The paper said: "By screening delivery options, eBay expects to keep shipping charges to roughly half of regular rates."

[Kuang_Grade]

I wouldn't bank on this being hugely successful...ebay buyers (at least in the US) are far and few between nowadays and there are no shortage of China based sellers selling a fair number of pirated J items (say sony pro duo memory sticks or J media products) with listings that are in machine translation nightmare english at insanely low prices that any legitimate J seller would find impossible to come close to. And it seems that many consumption based J sub cultures, be it JDM parts or high end minidisc players or Kubrick minifigs already or Mazinger Z zippo lighters have J based english speaking (or are FGs proper) sellers on Ebay already, so I don't know if there are ton of J products that aren't getting on Ebay because of lack of English proficiency.

[FG Lurker]

I think the biggest problem eBay faces here is the success of Yahoo and the overall attitude of most Japanese sellers. In my experience Japanese sellers do not want that hassle or potential problems of shipping overseas.

Based on things I have bought on Yahoo I wouldn't want to buy from J-sellers if I was overseas either -- packing here is generally pretty horrific. That anything arrives in one piece is a huge statement to the service of Kuroneko and Yuupak.

eBay's eventual goal is almost certainly a full-scale reentry into the Japanese domestic market with their own site. Again they face the dominance of Yahoo (in the same way that Yahoo faced eBay's dominance in the US market.) If they offer very low fees and a very high level of service then I can see that they could do better this time than they did previously. It's still an uphill battle though -- they have to attract sellers without a buyer base, and they have to attract buyers without a seller base.