InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
October 4, 1999
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Cultural Preferences
Then there are companies in industries where people have many choices. These companies have to go a step further and take into account cultural preferences, not just in text but in interface design and even navigation. Chipshot.com, for example, tailored its Japanese Web site to reflect the particular buying habits of Japanese golfers, who tend to be more brand-focused than American golfers, Mehta says. Chipshot.com displays brand names on its customized clubs more prominently on the Japanese site than on its U.S. site. In addition, the Japanese site emphasizes that customized clubs are made to order, whereas on the U.S. site the emphasis is on the 50% discount, because Americans are more concerned about price.
As a rule, consumers in the United Kingdom, too, are price-sensitive, while German consumers want to know what a product is and what it does before they look at cost, says Giga's Bennett. Creating a Web site that takes these preferences into account may mean bringing in consultants, partnering with local companies, or even buying local companies the way Amazon.com has done. The latter method has an added benefit, in that it helps with logistics. "Once you take into account the price of shipping the goods, a lot of the cost advantages are gone," Bennett says.
Bandwidth
For companies with high transaction volumes, global service providers can provide an additional performance boost, as well as scalability and relia-bility. Companies such as Digital Island, Frontier GlobalCenter, Exodus, and Qwest provide hosted servers, mirror sites, or optimized global distribution networks. They may do everything from server installation to maintenance to tape-backup rotation. Chipshot.com is looking for the right ISP to provide fiber links to Japan.
Sack is beta testing a Digital Island network service called TraceWare, which lets any IP application determine a Web-site visitor's country of origin. The service will let HighWire localize advertising banners for that country. This is particularly important for journals with pharmaceutical ads, Sack says, because the names of the drugs and the approval processes vary by country. Using a reverse DNS approach--which takes the IP addresses of the users requesting content and asks the server to look them up through the domain name system--is slow, and it doesn't work for about a quarter of the addresses that come through Stanford's HighWire system, Sack says.
Buyers need to be leery of network services they don't need. Some of Kodak's international employees have told Lund that their Web-response time is poor and suggested setting up mirror servers. But after subscribing to a site-monitoring service called Keynote from Keynote Systems Inc., he has determined that when Kodak.com is slow, it's because of the backbone, not Kodak.com itself. So, for now, mirror sites or hosted services are probably unnecessary.
Of course, when Kodak.com gets into E-commerce, the situation will likely change. At that time, the company will look into ISPs and other services that provide hot backups and mirror sites, because, Lund says, "You're likely to justify those services more easily when you're generating real revenue."
Photo of Sack by Richard Morgenstein
"Most people have a separate workflow for their translation," says McElfresh. "Documents are created, translated, and uploaded as available. That can work, but what you find is the vast majority of the information online isn't translated into all the languages necessary. We're making it part of the process."
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Some companies can get away with an English-only Web site because customers are "captive" and will not defect, says Giga's Bennett. Others, such as Dell Computer, have a "semi-captive" audience born of high brand-awareness. These companies can translate content, but maintain a consistent look and feel and organizational structure across sites. Indeed, Dell's Web site is localized for 50 countries and can be read in 21 languages, but the overall layout remains the same for all.
It's no secret that international telecommunications can be unreliable. In most countries outside the United States, Internet access is more expensive, access speeds are slower, and many people are still using older versions of popular browsers and paying for every minute they're online. Even business-to-business leased-line charges cost an average of 10 times as much as they cost in the United States, Bennett says. To preserve customers' patience, Bennett recommends that companies code tightly in HTML and create text-only versions of their Web sites early on, giving visitors a choice as the site starts loading.
Stanford University's HighWire Press relies on Digital Island to serve its customers, the world's major scientific publishers who pay HighWire Press to put their scientific and technical journals online. Digital Island, which has a network of data centers in New York, Santa Clara, Honolulu, and London, connects directly to 19 countries with content-distribution sites in nine markets worldwide. "I'd been looking for a way to solve the delay in international network transmission over the Internet, says John Sack, associate publisher and director for HighWire. The alternative for HighWire would have been buying network capacity and putting routers or mirror servers in 20 countries.
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