- What three traps did you find on your own pricing page?
- Every price on our pricing, services, and subscription pages is shown only in U.S. dollars — no yen figure anywhere. No price on any of those pages is labeled 税込 (tax-inclusive) or 税抜 (tax-exclusive). And nothing on the page signals that a pricing decision was ever made for a Japanese buyer specifically, as opposed to just showing the same number to everyone.
- Have you fixed it yet?
- No. As of publishing this, the gap is still there. We're writing about it before fixing it, because the audit is the part worth sharing — not a claim that we already got it right.
TL;DR
We publish guidance on the pricing-page traps that make foreign SaaS companies look untrustworthy to Japanese buyers: dollar-only pricing, no tax-inclusive label, no sign that pricing was actually localized rather than just translated around. While reviewing that guidance for accuracy, I opened our own live pricing page as a sanity check. It failed on all three counts: every price is shown in dollars only, nothing is labeled 税込 or 税抜, and there's no indication anyone made a pricing decision for Japan specifically. We're publishing the audit before the fix, on purpose, because the three-trap checklist is the useful part here — not a claim that our own house is already in order.
Key Takeaways
- Trap 1 — dollar-only pricing. No yen figure anywhere means the buyer does the currency math, and the extra step itself is a small signal the page wasn't built for them.
- Trap 2 — no tax label. A price with no 税込/税抜 marking leaves a Japanese buyer unsure whether the number they're looking at is the final one.
- Trap 3 — no sign of a decision. A converted number and a localized number can look identical; only one of them tells the buyer someone thought about them specifically.
- Writing the guidance didn't protect us from the mistake. Knowing the checklist and running it against your own page are two different actions.
- We're publishing this unfixed. The audit is worth sharing now; the fix can follow, in the open.
The sanity check that wasn't supposed to find anything
I was reviewing one of our own articles on pricing-page localization before it went out, making sure the examples still held up. Partway through, I did what I thought was a formality: pulled up our own live pricing page to confirm we weren't accidentally describing a problem we'd already fixed for ourselves.
We hadn't fixed it. We'd never checked it.
Three traps, all present
Trap one: dollar-only pricing. Every figure on our pricing page, our services page, and our subscription page is a dollar amount — $250, $450, $490 a month, $1,490, up through $8,990 for the largest package. Not one of them has a yen figure next to it, not even a simple converted one. A Japanese buyer reading the page has to do the currency math themselves before they can even start comparing us to a domestic alternative.
Trap two: no tax label. None of those prices say 税込 (tax-inclusive) or 税抜 (tax-exclusive). For a Japanese buyer, that's not a footnote — it's the difference between knowing what they'll actually pay and having to ask. We leave them asking.
Trap three: no sign of a decision. This is the one that stung the most, because it's the hardest to see from the inside. A page that runs your price through today's exchange rate and a page that deliberately set a yen price can end up looking almost the same — some numbers, a currency symbol. But one of them tells a buyer "we thought about you," and the other doesn't, and ours doesn't.
Knowing the checklist isn't the same as running it
We wrote the article that names this exact pattern. We've told other companies, in public, that this is what erodes trust before a Japanese buyer reads a single feature. Writing it clearly didn't stop us from shipping it ourselves — because the checklist lived in an article, not in a habit of checking our own pages against it.
That's the part I want to be honest about. This wasn't a case of not knowing better. It was a case of knowing better and never actually pointing the checklist at our own site.
The shift in one line: a checklist you've published isn't a checklist you've run — until you point it at your own page and read what it says.
Why we're not fixing it before we publish this
The honest version of this story is more useful than a tidy one. If I quietly fixed our pricing page first and then published this as "here's a mistake we already corrected," you'd have no way to tell that from a mistake we never made in the first place. Publishing it unfixed is the only way to make the audit itself verifiable — and it forces us to actually do the fix, in public, instead of letting it sit as a someday task.
A quieter question for your own pricing page
You probably know whether your pricing page has been translated into Japanese. Most teams can answer that one.
Here's the one worth asking instead: does it show a yen figure anywhere, is that figure labeled 税込 or 税抜, and is there anything on the page that would tell a Japanese buyer someone made a decision about them specifically — rather than just letting the same dollar number show through? If you're not sure, that's not a failure, it's just an audit you haven't run yet. When you want a second pair of eyes on it, a Japan Readiness Check is built to look at exactly this.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a dollar-only pricing page actually a problem for a Japanese B2B buyer?
It's not a legal problem for B2B the way it can be for consumer-facing pricing in Japan, but it's a trust problem. A buyer who has to convert the currency themselves, with no yen figure anywhere, is being handed a small piece of extra work that signals the page wasn't built with them in mind — before they've read a single feature.
Do we legally have to show a tax-inclusive (税込) price in Japan?
Japan's total-price display rule (総額表示義務, effective April 2021) mainly requires tax-inclusive pricing for prices shown to general consumers. B2B pricing has more flexibility, and 税抜 display is commonly accepted for business buyers. Even where it isn't strictly required, leaving the tax treatment unlabeled entirely reads as unfinished rather than intentional. Always verify the current rule against official National Tax Agency guidance rather than assuming.
What's the difference between converting a price and localizing it?
Converting a price runs the number through today's exchange rate and shows whatever comes out, which drifts every time the rate moves. Localizing a price means someone deliberately decided what the yen figure should be, labeled whether tax is included, and made a choice about how it should look to a Japanese buyer specifically — a decision, not a calculation.
How do we check our own pricing page for this?
View it as a Japanese buyer would and look for three things: a yen figure anywhere on the page, a tax label (税込 or 税抜) next to every price, and any sign at all that someone made a pricing decision for Japan rather than letting the same dollar figure show through. If none of the three are there, the page hasn't been localized — only translated around.
Did you fix your own pricing page before publishing this?
No. As of publishing this, our own pricing page still shows dollar figures with no yen amount and no tax label. We're publishing the audit before the fix on purpose, because the checklist is the useful part — not a claim that we already got it right.