Cyber Mall Makes Pitch In Japanese Shopping Center On Internet Targets Shoppers In Japan

Shopping malls aren’t that unusual on the Internet, but a Bellevue company says it has developed the first one in Japanese.

Pacific Software Publishing Inc.’s mall is called MOSHIx2, based on the Japanese telephone greeting, “moshi-moshi.”

Operating the mall in Japanese is “probably not necessary, but it’s nicer,” Pacific Software President Ken Uchikura said. “The people we’re targeting don’t speak English well.”

The Japanese market also is comparatively small, Uchikura agreed. Only about 10 percent of households in Japan have personal computers, compared with about 50 percent in the United States.

Still, the service has signed up nine companies as advertisers so far. They include a couple of Japanese publications, a software company, a discount gold supply firm, an Arizona golf resort, a Seattle law firm, and a personal shopper service that is a division of Pacific Software.

Viewers can see a company’s logo, or a photo of a product.

Around 40 people have signed up to use the service, about three-quarters of them with addresses in Japanese cities, Uchikura said. The user list also includes a Bill Gates of Redmond.

“We can’t verify that it’s THE Bill Gates, but his e-mail address is the right one,” Uchikura said, referring to the billionaire chairman of Redmond-based Microsoft Corp.

The price of advertising on MOSHIx2 is $75 a month for 10 megabytes if the ad is generic, or $125 if it is for a specific product.

“We are not trying to become millionaires,” Uchikura said. “We just want to recover our costs and share a wonderful site.”

Experts said it’s hard to gauge how many companies advertise through Internet malls, but that the concept is ripe for rapid growth.

“The Web is everywhere,” said Ralph Simms, vice president of Northwest Nexus. “It’s as ubiquitous as the Sears catalog, and probably in more homes.”