[karim79]

Brilliant article and thank you for sharing.

Local payment methods seem to be a really huge thing. For instance, I'm told that in India most people want to use Google Pay, and even street vendors have QR codes at their stalls. If anyone can weigh in on that I'd love to hear about it.

[canpan]

Working in that area in Japan. I think I can provide some answers.

Payment: CC are mostly used for BtoC but if you are a BtoB SaaS you want invoice and a local presence (ie no tax or currency shenanigans for your customer).

Hand on sales: Don't expect customers to sign up for a free plan and convert. Your conversion rate will be close to 0. Mostly scammers. Instead: Contact form, Cold call, go out to events, lots of drinking.

Regarding language: Many people do not speak English. I think that surprises some, but Japan is big and you can live forever happily only speaking Japanese. So if you don't support Japanese it's a complete no go.

[jesterson]

> Many people do not speak English

More like noone speaks English, plainly put

[Scramblejams]

> Hand on sales: Don't expect customers to sign up for a free plan and convert. Your conversion rate will be close to 0. Mostly scammers.

Brutal! Is that true even for Japanese companies with a traditional sales force?

[canpan]

Your sales team can totally utilize a free plan, while communicating with the customer. But a free sign up from the website, without sales person contact, is something we only had negative experience with, so stopped doing it. (Talking about B2B, B2C might be different)

[karim79]

In other words, don't bother from outside of Japan unless the SaaS has been fully translated into Japanese? That's what I'm getting from this response. Is that true?

[felixding]

Translation alone is simply not enough. You'll need local presence, Japanese sales people, and patience (a lot of them).

[karim79]

Thank you. I'm already on it.

[chupchap]

Those QR codes are for a payment method called UPI that is managed by a conglomerate of banks (NPCI), with the blessings of the Reserve bank. Google Pay, PhonePe etc are apps that are interoperable and allow P2P or P2B payments by scanning a code. The payments are instantaneous and free; at least for P2P scenarios. Anyone with a bank account can sign up for any of the UPI apps and generate a QR code using which they can accept payments from anyone and this drastically reduces the effort it takes to join the digital payments economy.

[rk06]

Indian here. UPI (QR code for payment) is huge. UPI adoption is extremely high.

In no-trust society like India, where fake note, torn notes, fake coins can strike anyone. UPI is blessing to most.

[devsda]

Its UPI. Google Pay is just one provider among many including Amazon.

You don't even need a middleman. Your regular bank app also directly supports UPI payments.

[karim79]

Someone actually downvoted this comment, and I would honestly like to know why. Did I say something offensive?