Japanese e-Commerce market -How to boost the conversion rate

Japanese consumer behaviour

The Japanese e-Commerce market is different as you might have guessed. Have you ever seen some of those fashion magazines that are stocked at convenience stores in Japan? The selection of magazines at convenience stores is an indication of which magazine has the most circulation in each category. If you have seen those popular fashion magazines, you’ll notice the difference between those in the UK or the US. The contents in Japan are more like a catalogue with many products and information on one page. Japanese consumers are used to product overload and text-rich information and they trust a product the more details there are. In other words, the more information the more sales.

The challenge of converting visitors to customers on e-Commerce

Unless your brand is already established, Japanese consumers are much more likely to trust real people rather than paid ads that come up on the feed of social media platforms. It is for this reason that Japanese consumers trust shop assistants who can give advice to them more. Similarly, brands are using ambassadors and influencers to grow audiences. However, an issue is that when customers visit an e-commerce shop, usually there’s no one to answer some less obvious questions on the spot. Also, the images are limited and often difficult to imagine the product on them or in their lifestyle.

Boost the conversion rate in the Japanese e-Commerce market

In early on, successful Japanese e-Commerce retailers such as Adastria and Baycrews realised it’s important to focus on converting visitors to customers and not so much on growing audiences. Vanish Standard who created Staff Start, an e-Commerce application, realised shop staff can address this issue both online and offline. Their innovative app has been helping over 1,600 brands including fashion, cosmetics and wines, and increased sales by almost 3-fold in 2020 alone.

The eCommerce market in Japan 2020, Data, Trend

Their unique system enables shop staff to become influencers and they can earn incentives by selling the products on their website or social media platforms. The app displays the sales results among staff and motivates them by showing how well they are doing. A top shop staff recorded sales of 90million yen a month. Baycrews reported in January 2021, 70% of total online sales of 4.6 billion yen came via the Staff Start app and it’s growing.

In the same way, Channel talk provides a chat system service and businesses can manage all the chats between the shop staff, customers from e-commerce sites and official LINE account on one platform. By deploying this communication system, they’ve helped to not only increase sales conversion by 70% but also enabled upsell & cross-sell on e-commerce. They believe the answer is in close interaction with customers to convert them into loyal customers.

Employee to consumer

This approach of linking shop staff to customers via technology is fundamental to how Japanese businesses are already moving onto the next stage of unifying online and offline to create a real omnichannel business with multiple touchpoints. They call this seamless business model – Employee To Consumer, E2C in Japan.

Identifying a person’s trigger motivation is key to persuasion. Have you thought about this marketing approach for your business? Do you want to find out more about the Japanese e-Commerce market? Please get in touch if you have any questions.

Resources

https://www.staff-start.com/

WWD Japan

JapanConsuming