eCommerce market of Japan is one of the fast-growing markets in the world.
In 2017, the B2C eCommerce market of Japan was over 110 billion USD, with growth rate of 11% when compared to year 2016.
What is notable in case of Japan is online sales’ relatively low share of retail. Even Japan is a highly developed market, still less than 10% of retail takes place online. When considering that in China already 30% of retail takes place online, Japan eCommerce has great growth potential for future years.
Although Japan has potential for foreign retailers also, certain characteristics should be kept well in mind when the company plans opening eCommerce to Japan. Japanese consumers are more conservative than for example European consumers when it comes to trying new products. It means that new foreign brands and online stores will have challenges to create a trust among customers.
For this reason, localization is a must when planning to access Japan eCommerce market and to create trust to consumers. Over 95 % of Japanese speak only their native language. This means that the content and service have to be provided in Japanese.
Japanese consumers do their research before they do a purchase. According to statistics data of Japan’s leading marketplace Rakuten Ichiba, avg. 83% of consumer’s state, that they do a research concerning the product before the do the purchase. 97 % of people do the research in Internet.
Therefore, retailers should provide rich and variate content about their products, and to encourage customers to write reviews.
Building process of the brand websites, product card details, content translations and optimization, sales management, marketing, customer service and transfers of funds and managed by Rakuten partner companies. Rakuten provides each company their eCommerce consultant who’s task is to give strategic guidance for merchants to increase the sales.
Are you interested in eCommerce in Japan?
Flying Lynx can organise the whole process for your brand, starting from market research to confirm the product market fit. If research shows potential, the next steps are to prepare Japan marketing plan, build up localised sales channel solution, including logistics to Japan and manage money transfers. After that the next step is to SELL.
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