The Legal Pages a Japanese Shop Needs Before Selling to the U.S.

Why these pages matter more when you are foreign

A shopper in Ohio buying from a Japanese shop is taking a risk they can feel: the parcel crosses an ocean, the refund would cross it back, and the seller is on the other side of a thirteen-hour time difference. Everything you publish about what happens when something goes wrong is doing the work of reassurance. Shops that write a clear returns page convert better than shops that write nothing, even when the policy itself is strict. Silence reads as 'you are on your own.'

There is a second, colder reason. Payment processors, marketplaces and app stores review your site. Chargeback cases are decided partly on whether your policy was visible at checkout. Platforms like Paddle, Stripe and PayPal all expect terms, a refund policy and a privacy notice to exist and to be reachable from the footer. A missing page can freeze payouts long before any regulator notices.

And the legal layer is real, if usually manageable. Japan's Act on Specified Commercial Transactions (特定商取引法) applies to you because you are the seller, wherever the buyer lives. On the American side, the FTC governs deceptive pricing and shipping claims, CAN-SPAM governs marketing email, and a growing list of states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas and more — govern personal data with rules that apply to businesses handling their residents' data, regardless of where the business sits. None of this requires a lawyer for a small stationery shop. It requires seven pages written honestly.

The seven pages you need

Before the detail, here is the whole list. Every one of them should be linked in your site footer, in plain English, and reachable in one click from any product page.

Page 1

特定商取引法に基づく表記 / Legal notice — required by Japanese law, in Japanese and English.

Page 2

Cancellation, returns and refunds — the page American shoppers actually read.

Page 3

Privacy notice — what you collect, why, who you share it with, and how to ask for deletion.

Page 4

Terms of service — the contract: orders, prices, currency, liability, governing law.

Page 5

Shipping and customs — delivery windows, who pays duty, what happens if a parcel is lost.

Page 6

Email and marketing consent — how people opt in, how they unsubscribe, your postal address.

Page 7

Cookies and tracking — only if you use analytics, pixels or ads (most shops do).

1. 特定商取引法 — the Japanese requirement, in English

This is the one Japanese sellers already know and most translate badly. The Act on Specified Commercial Transactions requires an online seller to publish the seller's name, address, phone number, contact email, the person responsible, the price including tax, additional charges such as shipping, payment methods and timing, delivery timing, and the return/cancellation policy. If you sell to the U.S. from Japan, you still publish it — you are a Japanese business.

The practical problem is the address and phone number. Individuals selling from home are understandably reluctant. There is a recognised route: use a business address service or a rental office, and state that the full address and phone number will be disclosed without delay upon request (請求があったら遅滞なく開示します). This is common practice, but understand its limits — some platforms and payment providers will still require verifiable details privately, and the disclosure-on-request wording must be honoured if someone asks.

Publish it in both languages. The Japanese version satisfies the law; the English version does something else entirely — it shows an American buyer that a real registered business with a real name stands behind the shop. Title the English page 'Legal Notice (Act on Specified Commercial Transactions)' rather than a literal transliteration, and keep the same fields in the same order.

One field trips people up constantly: 'return policy' inside the 特商法 notice must match your separate returns page. If the notice says no returns and the returns page offers thirty days, a payment provider reviewing your site will treat the contradiction as a red flag.

2. Cancellation, returns and refunds — the page that decides the sale

Japan has no general cooling-off right for ordinary online shopping (クーリングオフ does not apply to standard e-commerce), so your policy is whatever you publish. That freedom is a trap: American shoppers arrive with expectations set by Amazon and by U.S. shops, and they read a missing policy as a hostile one.

Write it as a sequence of specific answers, not as a paragraph of law. Can an order be cancelled before it ships, and until what moment? What is the return window, counted from delivery rather than from dispatch? Who pays return shipping — you, or the customer? Are personalised, dated or opened items excluded? What happens with a damaged parcel, and what do you need from the buyer (photographs of the item and the outer box, usually within a set number of days)? What happens if the parcel never arrives, and how long you will wait before treating it as lost? How is the refund issued and in what currency?

A workable stationery policy: cancellation free until dispatch; returns accepted within fourteen days of delivery for unopened, unused goods; buyer pays return postage; damaged or wrong items replaced or refunded in full with photographs supplied within seven days of delivery; personalised and dated items excluded; refunds issued to the original payment method within five business days of the item arriving back. Strict is fine. Vague is not.

Two points people miss. First, currency: a refund converted twice can leave the buyer a few dollars short, and it makes them angry out of proportion to the amount. Say plainly that refunds are issued in the original charge currency and that exchange differences are outside your control. Second, duties: if the buyer paid U.S. duty or a brokerage fee on the parcel, that money went to the carrier and the government, not to you. Say so, and tell them they may be able to claim it back from the carrier — otherwise they will assume you kept it.

If you sell digital downloads or a course, the rule changes shape. Say clearly that access is granted immediately and whether that means refunds are unavailable once files are downloaded. If a payment provider acts as merchant of record, point to their refund process as well as your own.

3. Privacy notice — and why U.S. state law now applies to you

You are already handling personal data: names, shipping addresses, email addresses, order histories, and — if you run analytics or an ad pixel — behaviour. Japan's APPI (個人情報保護法) requires you to state the purpose of use and to handle requests about that data. The American picture is now a patchwork of state laws, and several of them apply based on whose data you hold rather than where you sit. If you sell to California, you are within reach of the CCPA/CPRA once you cross its thresholds, and its ideas — disclose, allow deletion, do not sell without an opt-out — have spread to a dozen more states.

For a small shop, one honest page satisfies almost all of it. State who you are and how to contact you. List what you collect and why: name and address to ship, email to confirm orders and, only with consent, to send the newsletter, payment details handled by the processor and never stored by you, analytics data to understand which pages help. Name the third parties by category and, better, by name: your platform (Shopify, Etsy), your payment provider, your email tool, your analytics, your shipping carriers.

Then the rights. Say that anyone can ask you for a copy of their data, ask you to correct or delete it, and unsubscribe at any time, with the email address to use and the timeframe you will respond in. Say how long you keep records — remember Japanese tax rules require you to keep transaction records for years, so 'we delete on request' needs the honest caveat that order and export records are retained as the law requires.

Do not claim more than you do. 'We never share your data' is false the moment your carrier gets an address label. 'We use bank-level encryption' invites a question you may not want to answer. Plain accuracy protects you better than confident marketing language.

Also mention children if applicable: most shops simply state the site is not directed at children under 13 and that they do not knowingly collect their data.

4. Terms of service — the boring page that saves you

Terms are your contract with the buyer, and for a cross-border seller they answer a question that is otherwise genuinely uncertain: whose law applies and where a dispute is heard. State that the contract is governed by Japanese law and that disputes go to a named Japanese court. That single clause is why terms exist.

The rest is straightforward. Who you are as a legal entity. That placing an order is an offer which you accept when you dispatch — this lets you cancel cleanly if a price was wrong or stock ran out. The currency you charge in. That prices exclude import duty and taxes payable in the destination country. That product photographs are representative and that handmade or paper goods vary slightly. Your intellectual property in designs, photographs and text. Limits on liability, to the extent the law allows. How you handle order cancellation by you, and account termination if you have accounts.

Keep it in the same voice as the rest of your shop. A translated wall of boilerplate from a U.S. template will contain clauses that make no sense for a Japanese sole proprietor — arbitration in Delaware, sales-tax language, references to statutes you are not subject to. Shorter and accurate beats longer and borrowed.

5. Shipping, customs and duties — the disclosure Americans complain about most

The single largest source of angry email in cross-border stationery is a customs bill the buyer did not expect. It is also entirely preventable with two sentences on the product page and a proper shipping page behind them.

Say who pays duty. Almost every small Japanese seller ships DDU/DAP, meaning the buyer pays any duty, tax or brokerage fee charged on arrival. Write it in the buyer's language: 'Import duties and taxes are not included in the price. If your country charges them, they are collected by the carrier on delivery and are the customer's responsibility.' Put it near the price, not only in a footer page.

Then give honest windows. Separate processing time (how long before you dispatch) from transit time (how long the carrier takes), and give a range rather than a promise. State the carriers you use, whether tracking is included, and what happens during customs delays — which are common and outside your control. State what you declare on the customs form, and state that you declare the true value: buyers sometimes ask sellers to mark an order as a gift or to under-declare, and your policy page is the easiest place to refuse in advance, politely and permanently.

Finish with loss and damage. When do you consider a parcel lost, what will you do then, and what do you need from the buyer? Say it before it happens and the conversation stays calm.

6. Email, consent and CAN-SPAM

If you send a newsletter to American subscribers, CAN-SPAM applies. It is not onerous, but it is specific: your message must not use deceptive subject lines or headers, must be identifiable as commercial, must include a valid physical postal address, and must offer a working unsubscribe that you honour within ten business days. You cannot charge for unsubscribing or require a login to do it.

Japan's Act on Specified Commercial Transactions and the anti-spam law push in the same direction and add an opt-in expectation: get consent before you send, keep a record of when and how it was given, and include the sender's name and contact details.

Practically, that means three things. Use a real signup where the person actively agrees — a checked-by-default box bundled into checkout is the thing to avoid. Keep the record your email platform stores of that consent. And put your business name, postal address and one-click unsubscribe in the footer of every campaign. If you use a service like Brevo or Mailchimp these are built in; the failure mode is switching to sending from your own address and dropping them.

One more, for those who collect email in exchange for a freebie: say what else you will send. 'Get the free ship-by calendar' followed by weekly marketing with no warning is the pattern that generates spam complaints, and complaint rates are what get sending domains blocked.

7. Product claims, safety and what you cannot say

The FTC polices honesty in the American market: descriptions, comparisons, endorsements and pricing must not mislead. For stationery this is mostly gentle territory, but there are a few live wires.

Fake urgency and invented discounts are the first. A 'was ¥3,000, now ¥1,800' price must reflect a price you genuinely charged. A countdown timer that resets every visit is a deceptive practice.

Reviews and gifted product are the second. If you send free product to a reviewer or pay for a post, the relationship must be disclosed by them clearly — and the FTC has been increasingly willing to act on undisclosed endorsements. Ask for disclosure in writing when you send PR samples. Never write or buy reviews.

Then category-specific rules. Anything marketed for children under 12 falls under CPSIA and may require testing and tracking labels — pencils, crayons, sticker sets aimed at kids are not automatically exempt. Cosmetics-adjacent items, food-contact goods and scented products carry their own labelling rules. If a product could be read as a toy, get advice before you list it for children.

Finally, images and fonts. Selling a design that uses a font licensed for personal use only, or a character that belongs to someone else, is the fastest way to lose a shop. American platforms act on IP complaints quickly and ask questions later. Keep your licences filed.

Etsy versus your own shop — who covers what

On Etsy, the platform supplies the checkout terms, handles a great deal of the payment and data compliance, and gives you structured fields for processing time, returns and a shop policy section. It does not remove your obligations: your shop policies still have to be filled in accurately, your 特商法 information still needs to appear (Etsy provides a seller details field for exactly this), and your own emails to buyers are still yours.

On Shopify, Squarespace or any self-hosted shop, all seven pages are yours. The theme will link a footer but will not write the content, and the generated templates are written for U.S. sellers — they will reference U.S. states, arbitration and sales tax that do not fit you. Treat generated policies as a skeleton to rewrite, not a finished page.

Wherever you sell, do one thing that costs nothing: put the returns window and the duty statement on the product page itself, not only behind a link. It is the single highest-return change most Japanese shops can make to their conversion rate on American traffic.

How to write these without a lawyer's budget

Draft in Japanese first, in your own words, answering the questions in this article one by one. You know your own operation better than any template does. Then translate into English aimed at a shopper, not at a court — short sentences, concrete numbers, no 'shall' and no 'hereinafter'.

Then check three things. That the pages agree with each other: the returns window in your 特商法 notice, your returns page and your product pages must be the same number. That every page is dated with a last-updated line. That every page is linked from the footer and reachable from checkout.

Where it is genuinely worth paying for advice: if you hold significant customer data, sell to children, use a fulfilment company in the U.S., or reach a size where state privacy thresholds are in play. For a maker shipping a few hundred parcels a year, honest self-written pages plus a translation review is the proportionate answer.

And revisit them once a year. Duty thresholds move, state privacy laws keep arriving, and your own processing times change with the seasons. A policy page that has been wrong for two years is worse than no page, because it is evidence you did not mean it.

FAQ