Alas, I’ve hit the first bump in the road to my software empire :(.
I’m using Plimus as my e-commerce provider. All in all they’ve been great, but I’ve run into a couple of snags with their Japanese support.
The first is with Japanese text. Plimus provides localized versions of their payment forms, including Japanese, and does a decent job at it. But they don’t support Japanese elsewhere on the page — like in the <title> or <h1> tags. That text gets garbled.
I reported the issue to support, and they told me they’d pass on the issue to their developers:
Unfortunately we do currently not support localization of the product name order Japanese characters in the order page design HTML code field.
However I really appreciate your taking time to make suggestions to improve the Plimus system.
I have forwarded your suggestions to our development team.
Please know, we take every request and suggestion seriously and make every effort to accommodate our vendors.
As you are no doubt aware, some changes take longer than others, but we will strive to implement them all as soon as is practical.
Hmm, I give them a B- on this one. Luckily, the issue is pretty easily fixed by replacing the Japanese text with images, although it’s a pain. Here’s the result. Of course, the <title> tag can’t be fixed this way.
The other issue is with Japanese currency. There are actually two problems. The first is that Plimus displays all currencies to two decimal places — so $50.00, or £20.00, etc. And ¥1,000.00? Sorry, but the yen is the minimum unit of currency in Japan. You can’t pay someone a half a yen.
The second problem stems from Plimus’ rounding system. You can set up the system to round currencies for a better appearance, but the number of digits is the same for all currencies. Unfortunately, rounding to the nearest 100 yen is much less of a difference than rounding to the nearest hundred pounds! I also opened a support request for this one, but haven’t received a response yet.
Here’s hoping.