Dear Jeff Bezos
You are losing sales because your sites are in different encodings.
Amazon.com is in ISO-8859-1.
Amazon.co.jp is in SHIFT-JIS.
If your customers type a Japanese book title (like ねじまき鳥クロニクル) on amazon.com, they get hello crazy talk, like this: ãã˜ã¾ã鳥クãƒãƒ‹ã‚¯ãƒ«
“Hello crazy talk” is best translated as “no sale for you.”
Sincerely,
The UTF-8 Avenger
Amazon uses Perl/Mason internally, which is a templating system for web pages based on Perl. Perl has difficulties with UTF-8. The Amazon libraries and internal web services often have difficulties with mere 8-bit non-ASCII text.
Frankly, you should be amazed it can handle Japanese customers at all.