So you can see that China is a huge country with more Internet users than the population of the USA, with large purchasing power. Add to this the fact that the Chinese people love "Western" consumer goods and you should be asking yourselves - why have we not taken this market seriously? The value of consumer items bought by Chinese people on holiday, outside China, has risen from US$4billion in 1995 to over US$30 billion in 2007.

Chinese culture and mentality is very different from Europe and America. Ecommerce web site design is also very different and web pages tend to be very busy compared to their western counterparts. Lots of animation and flashing text are the hallmarks of successful Chinese web sites. Take a look at the front page of QQ a popular Chinese web site. Twelve separate animated graphics on one page. Compare it to MSN with just two animations and a lot less information on one page. Chinese culture dictates that its people are used to lots of different things vying for their attention at the same time, thus twelve different bits of animation are acceptable, indeed necessary to keep their audience interested.

Another factor that you have to consider is that a very small percentage of the population reads English. Whilst estimates vary there is general agreement that it is significantly less than 15% of the population. Thus to get your message across it has to be written in Mandarin. Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world - more than twice as many people that speak English speak Mandarin. It goes without saying that just chucking it through one of the many translation engines available is simply not good enough if you want to appear professional. To do the job properly you need to have your text professionally re-written by a native Mandarin speaker.

The companies that get it right reap significant rewards. The key is to maintain corporate style within a website that is designed to meet the requirements of the local Chinese population. Yahoo! have done this very successfully - look at the US site and the Chinese version. Others have not been quite so successful.