Lessons learned in building a commercial web site

by Terrie Lloyd

Are you interested in selling products or services on the Japanese web? OK, then let's do a short mental exercise. Imagine you want to set up a boutique specializing in imported beer from the USA. To give this business the best start possible, what would you do in the real world?

Most likely you'd hire a professional interior decorator, hire and train staff, test then buy the inventory, and finally launch a campaign in the local press. Maybe you'd also hand out flyers on the sidewalk and deliver leaflets to neighborhood mailboxes. The thing is that you know you have to execute ALL of these things in order to get your beer boutique running profitably. Selling on the Japanese Internet is no different. With a few standout exceptions, most web sites become popular through hard work and a business plan that creates a trinity of content, presentation, and marketing. Just like a real store, the sum of the parts is much greater than each activity on its own.

How to bring in repeat visitors
If there is one fundamental insight to be had about marketing on the Internet, it's understanding that the user's "eyeball time" is valuable and therefore has to be traded for something of value. Usually the trade will be for information, but it could also be for prizes, entertainment, or a mixture of all three. On Dai-Job, we have a jobs database (information), a weekly email newsletter (also information), tests (entertainment), and monthly sweepstakes (prizes).

The way these attractions work is that the prizes entice new people and give the site an active atmosphere. The database, tests, and newsletter filter the initial audience down to those people who are interested in jobs with foreign companies - the original purpose of the site. Although you might wonder if prizes have merit, surprisingly we have found that about 60% of people initially coming in for prizes also register for the weekly job listings e-mail.

If you are going to offer prizes and information, make sure that they match the demographics of your audience, which for 80% of Japanese Internet users is: male, aged 25 - 40, professional, high disposable income, typically married if over 35. On Dai-Job, we use demographically appropriate promotional items, such as hardware/software, personal hygiene goods, and gadgets. You also need to make sure that the prizes are of sufficient quality to be attractive. Old or low-end merchandise doesn't cut it, no matter how many units you are giving away. On Dai-Job in April and May, we gave away a Sony Vaio laptop and software each month. And for June and July we offered a high-end Micron 300 PII desktop computer.

Japanese like clubs -- where being a member gives a feeling of belonging, exclusivity, and privilege. Over time, this feeling also translates into trust and loyalty -- both essential ingredients in getting a customer to buy your product or service. Clubs are very well understood by Japanese retailers, and that's why almost every savvy Japanese company has a member's card.

Web sites and e-mail go hand-in-hand. The Web site will usually be your first point of contact with the consumer. However, research has proven that with the exception of search engines, few people will go back to a web site repeatedly; you have to entice them with previews via e-mail. On Dai-Job on an average day we get about 4,000 visitors, but on the evening and the day after we send out our e-mail newsletter, the number of visitors increases 2-3 times. People's time is precious and the newsletter helps them decide whether it's worth spending a few minutes on our web site or not.

Japanese Internet users read the print media to help structure their online activities. I imagine that this is because NTT's charges are so high - NTT, if you're reading this, help out the Japanese economy and drop your charges for data traffic! In Dai-Job's case, we consistently try to get articles into the Nikkei Shimbun (which we have done a number of times so far), with the result that the day following an article, our web site numbers increase by 300% or more. Another good publication for exposure is Internet magazine published by Impress.

Some tech tips
The biggest decision to make when developing a commercial Internet (Web and e-mail) site is to predict how much traffic you will get, and to choose what kind of software and hardware to use. As mentioned elsewhere in this article, I feel that the only traffic worth having is repeat traffic. In Japan at least, there seems to be an upper limit on audience size for narrow-interest sites (such as Dai-Job) of about 30,000 to 50,000. As of May 30th, 1998, Dai-Job had registered 23,500 members in just under 3 months - so we believe that we're about half way to the peak of our market share.

Sophisticated end user functionality doesn't have to mean huge expense. Because Dai-Job was an internal project, we have been very frugal with resources. We support 23,500 users with a web page on a local ISP, and the back end database on a 128Kbps leased line into the two Pentium 166MHz servers at our building.

The database engine is mSQL running on RedHat Linux. This combination has worked well for us, but we want to expand the systems functionality so we will be moving to Sybase SQLAnywhere (as a precursor to the full Adaptive Server package). Applications are written with Perl CGI and Java.

One major problem we had and a solution I'd like to share is that like a lot of web site developers, we have been using public ISP servers to run our pages and software. As anyone who has written Perl CGI's can attest to, it can take up to 10 seconds on a busy server for Perl to kick-start itself. This can mean an interminable wait by the visitor - with the result that they cut the connection after a few seconds and go somewhere else. About 3 months ago, we decided to run some tests to see if we could speed things up. We found that by leaving the web page with the ISP, but bringing the CGI's to an in-house server, we were able to keep the CGI's running continuously and therefore provide sub-1 second response times (some latency caused by making calls to our remote server from the web page) to visitors.

Lastly, although the site is currently operational, we intend to build in a lot more functionality over the next few months. One major item on the list is one-to-one marketing where we only present the jobs that the member has said they are interested in. To do this, we will be using Qweb, a local web tracking database tool put out by Tim Romero (CJ columnist, In My Opinion -- Ed)

Back to table of contents