Many overseas sites still suffer under beautiful, but slow, home pages that point to content-free pages and do not provide any real customer benefits to the users. This situation will not last for ever since most countries are moving up the Internet maturity curve rapidly. The Danish government is not afraid of crypto and is making good progress on a national digital signature scheme that can be used to authenticate citizens to all public authorities. Imagine the day when Americans can use a single digital signature to file both Federal and state tax returns on the Internet, pay any overdue taxes electronically, and also use the same signature to renew their car registration on the Department of Motor Vehicles' website. I bet Denmark gets there first.
Overseas websites are also often more mature in recognizing the international nature of the Web.
At a Web usability conference in The Netherlands, a participant told me that his company saw the Web as an important competitive advantage. Their main competitor is a large American company that is usually mentioned as having a good website, but this site is very American in nature, and overseas' users invariably feel that they are visiting a foreign site when they go there. In contrast, this other company was deliberately building a site that would be completely international. It would be localized into many languages, and even in countries where it would not be feasible to offer a translation, the site would at least feel international and not American. At InternetWorld Hong Kong it was striking that many of the larger booths represented content companies like Charles Schwab.