Considerations when working with China team
For Benefit Cosmetics the first site launched in March 2011 was for China site.
Hardworking, helpful people. Remind me a great deal of many Americans I've met.
Some major considerations:
- Language and time zone challenge collaboration. Our end of day in SFO is Chinas start. Many spoke little English and none of us Chinese. So language can be a challenge. Expect to work some late late nights, I did.
- In my experience, some Chinese respond better to top down direction from their boss than as self starters. So if work is not getting done then you may get more success driving it from top down (just like it works here too!!)
- China addresses are different: e.g. districts, subdistricts
- Facebook, youtube, twitter not allowed and google is day by day. China has own versions.
- China will typically use their own Chinese payment gateways (e.g. Alipay). Plus Chinese are more used to Cash on Delivery (i.e. not pay until delivered)
- Currency symbol is different, but number formatting such as 2 decimal places is the same
- Chinese read horizontally like the west
- When I last checked, network speeds for China are slow, much slower than US (4/5 times). This is the same for all Benefits competitors sites too. Maybe "the great firewall" of China has some impact.
- ChinaCache CDN is not the most modern CDN and expect will require changes to your site e.g. we had to suffix all pages with .html. Work hard to identify all such changes.
- IE6 still used, we had to accommodate for IE6 as many users were still on it. Hard to get exact numbers but I've heard up to 20%. I hope its rapidly falling but I doubt it.
Hardworking, helpful people. Remind me a great deal of many Americans I've met.
Some major considerations:
- Language and time zone challenge collaboration. Our end of day in SFO is Chinas start. Many spoke little English and none of us Chinese. So language can be a challenge. Expect to work some late late nights, I did.
- In my experience, some Chinese respond better to top down direction from their boss than as self starters. So if work is not getting done then you may get more success driving it from top down (just like it works here too!!)
- China addresses are different: e.g. districts, subdistricts
- Facebook, youtube, twitter not allowed and google is day by day. China has own versions.
- China will typically use their own Chinese payment gateways (e.g. Alipay). Plus Chinese are more used to Cash on Delivery (i.e. not pay until delivered)
- Currency symbol is different, but number formatting such as 2 decimal places is the same
- Chinese read horizontally like the west
- When I last checked, network speeds for China are slow, much slower than US (4/5 times). This is the same for all Benefits competitors sites too. Maybe "the great firewall" of China has some impact.
- ChinaCache CDN is not the most modern CDN and expect will require changes to your site e.g. we had to suffix all pages with .html. Work hard to identify all such changes.
- IE6 still used, we had to accommodate for IE6 as many users were still on it. Hard to get exact numbers but I've heard up to 20%. I hope its rapidly falling but I doubt it.
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