Shopping at the Japanese version of Amazon.com, Amazon.jp can be very daunting for the first time shopper. Even frequent users of the other Western versions often up on the Japanese site before they even visit it.
Shopping on the Japanese Amazon.co.jp (also called “Amazon.jp” occassionally) is not as stressful as one would think and has become increasingly simple recently due to some site redesigning.
Here are some direct, “cut to the chase” points to help in your shopping:
When you first visit the site, click on the link in the top right corner that says “In English”. This will take you to an English subpage and any page you visit thereafter will be in English. Even all the checkout pages will be in English!
There are some great Faq pages such as this general help page, this shipping page and their page on payment methods. Well worth a look at these as shipping can be pricey. Amazon.co.jp does normally offer great discounts though on many products which usually even out the cost of shipping.
Note that if you have an account at Amazon.com you will need to create a separate account at Amazon.co.jp. While it’s the same company which you can trust, their shopping services are separate as is the stock.
Creating an account is very easy and fast though and once you do the entire site will be in English by default every time you visit it.
To find a lot of the Japanese items you will have to type in the Japanese writing for the title which can be quite hard for most people. Google’s Language Tools is a great service which you can use to translate Japanese series and actor names from English into their native Japanese characters which you can copy and paste into Amazon.co.jp’s search box.
Hope this helps you. If you need further help, don’t be afraid to comment below and let me know so I can update this article with more info.
Happy Shopping!
Written by Brad Stephenson
Brad is a qualified Kids Yoga Instructor and anime fan who lives, writes and survives in Tokyo, Japan.