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Japan’s Stores.jp partners with department store chain to bring its retailers online

Yukari Mitsuhashi Yukari Mitsuhashi
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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Bracket, the startup operating the Shopify-like e-commerce platform Stores.jp, announced today that it has partnered with Japanese department store chain Parco. Through this partnership, the e-commerce company will assist over 3,000 tenant retailers in the department stores establish their online presence. Since its launch back in 1969, Parco has rolled out 19 stores nationwide in Japan, recently reporting over $2.6 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2013. Stores.jp began its e-commerce platform service back in August of 2012, and has acquired over 90,000 merchants since then. All Parco retailers are encouraged to establish their e-commerce sites using Stores.jp, with plans to drive user traffic from the store’s blog where retailer staff can introduce merchandise and products. Retailers are to set up a pre-order button in their online storefront, where customers can buy a product online in addition to picking it up at retail stores. To date, we’ve never witnessed a high-profile shopping complex like Parco roll out such a quantity of e-commerce sites for tenant retailers. Stores.jp’s CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto elaborated on the partnership: We’ve seen that some retailers from Parco can generate as much as 25% of their entire revenue from online…

parco-stores.jp_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Bracket, the startup operating the Shopify-like e-commerce platform Stores.jp, announced today that it has partnered with Japanese department store chain Parco. Through this partnership, the e-commerce company will assist over 3,000 tenant retailers in the department stores establish their online presence.

Since its launch back in 1969, Parco has rolled out 19 stores nationwide in Japan, recently reporting over $2.6 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2013. Stores.jp began its e-commerce platform service back in August of 2012, and has acquired over 90,000 merchants since then.

All Parco retailers are encouraged to establish their e-commerce sites using Stores.jp, with plans to drive user traffic from the store’s blog where retailer staff can introduce merchandise and products. Retailers are to set up a pre-order button in their online storefront, where customers can buy a product online in addition to picking it up at retail stores.

To date, we’ve never witnessed a high-profile shopping complex like Parco roll out such a quantity of e-commerce sites for tenant retailers. Stores.jp’s CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto elaborated on the partnership:

We’ve seen that some retailers from Parco can generate as much as 25% of their entire revenue from online sales. We’ll be more focused on coordinating blogs and syndicated e-commerce business. We want to enable all retailers in Parco successfully launch e-commerce sites.

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The storefront of the future? Tokyo department store digitizes its window display

Yukari Mitsuhashi Yukari Mitsuhashi
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Many national convenient store chains in Japan have installed digital signage at their storefronts to lure customers inside. The retail industry is typically aggressive, using enormous bright screens to showcase different products, to both encourage more purchases and to communicate their message. Japanese department store Parco has long been the center of the nation’s trendy fashions. And recently it has installed digital signage at its Shibuya storefront. There are six vertical screens that make up its ‘P-Wall’, showcasing the different products available on the Parco website, including 1,000 products by various brands. People can touch different products to see more details, or even check if that product is available in different colors. This P-Wall initiative was completed in collaboration with Tokyo-based TeamLab, and you can get a better idea of how the screens work in the video below. The six adjacent screens replace the traditional shop display windows, letting customers check out a variety of products in one place instead of browsing store after store. Many stores are trying to establish a better connection between their real stores and their online malls, and we’ll have to wait to see if P-Wall proves an effective solution for this problem.

Many national convenient store chains in Japan have installed digital signage at their storefronts to lure customers inside. The retail industry is typically aggressive, using enormous bright screens to showcase different products, to both encourage more purchases and to communicate their message.

Japanese department store Parco has long been the center of the nation’s trendy fashions. And recently it has installed digital signage at its Shibuya storefront. There are six vertical screens that make up its ‘P-Wall’, showcasing the different products available on the Parco website, including 1,000 products by various brands.

People can touch different products to see more details, or even check if that product is available in different colors. This P-Wall initiative was completed in collaboration with Tokyo-based TeamLab, and you can get a better idea of how the screens work in the video below.

The six adjacent screens replace the traditional shop display windows, letting customers check out a variety of products in one place instead of browsing store after store. Many stores are trying to establish a better connection between their real stores and their online malls, and we’ll have to wait to see if P-Wall proves an effective solution for this problem.

teamlab-p-wall

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Japan’s Zozotown unveils new app, but some fashion retailers want to ban it from stores

SCORE 1,220 Masaru Ikeda Masaru Ikeda
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Start Today, the company behind Japanese fashion commerce site Zozotown, recently announced that it is receiving applications for a new sort of Showrooming feature for offline fashion retailers. It is called Wear and it launches today. The service uses a mobile app (for iOS and Android) that lets consumers scan a barcode of a clothes item at a participating offline retailer, and then purchase it online on Zozotown or other sites. When you buy online, a sales commission will then be paid from Zozotown to the retailer. This is called ‘showrooming’, and is becoming more common consumer behavior not only in Japan but also in the US and China. According to Nikkei, some retailers are receptive to Zozotown’s efforts — but others are not. Lumine, a fashion mall chain in Tokyo, has asked their tenent stores to prohibit photo-shooting in stores by consumers, a firm stance against the showrooming wave. In contrast, Japanese department store Parco has partnered with the e-commerce company and agreed to receive a commission when the store succeeds in driving traffic to Zozotown. We are told that about 200 fashion brands will participate in the program. We’ve seen major e-commerce players exploring new opportunities in this…

Start Today, the company behind Japanese fashion commerce site Zozotown, recently announced that it is receiving applications for a new sort of Showrooming feature for offline fashion retailers. It is called Wear and it launches today.

The service uses a mobile app (for iOS and Android) that lets consumers scan a barcode of a clothes item at a participating offline retailer, and then purchase it online on Zozotown or other sites. When you buy online, a sales commission will then be paid from Zozotown to the retailer. This is called ‘showrooming’, and is becoming more common consumer behavior not only in Japan but also in the US and China.

According to Nikkei, some retailers are receptive to Zozotown’s efforts — but others are not. Lumine, a fashion mall chain in Tokyo, has asked their tenent stores to prohibit photo-shooting in stores by consumers, a firm stance against the showrooming wave. In contrast, Japanese department store Parco has partnered with the e-commerce company and agreed to receive a commission when the store succeeds in driving traffic to Zozotown. We are told that about 200 fashion brands will participate in the program.

We’ve seen major e-commerce players exploring new opportunities in this space. Amazon Japan is intensifying fashion sales by leveraging its same-day delivery advantage. Meanwhile Rakuten launched an e-commerce store in partnership with popular fashion retailer Beams back in May. Japan’s leading fashion retailer Magaseek partnered with NTT Docomo and to try to cultivate a revenue stream using the latter’s mobile subscriber userbase.

In addition to this latest initiative, Start Today has been busy as well, acquiring e-commerce platform developer Stores.jp back in July, and partnering with fashion coordination site iQON last year.

It will be interesting to see how the company will evolve the fashion retail scene in Japan. Our Bridge team is now working on a report on the O2O market in Japan and around the world. We expect to share some of our insights here soon, so please stay tuned.

parco-wear
Image courtesy: Parco

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