EC site sales continue to grow, not only in Japan but around the world. According to the JDMA, mail-order business sales rose by 10.8% year over year, confirming a clear upward trend.
As more and more companies launch EC sites or open stores on marketplace-style platforms, competition for sales is intensifying. To grow revenue under that pressure, plenty of businesses are now thinking about redesigning or renewing their EC sites. In this article, we explain from our own perspective why Shopify is the platform to choose for building or renewing a store site, even among the many EC site building options available.
Why Shopify Among So Many Platforms
Japan now has more than 20 EC site building platforms, and many companies are unsure which one to use or how they actually differ. Out of all of them, the one we recommend is Shopify.
As the platform with the world’s No.1 market share, Shopify lets you build a highly customizable store for an affordable price of around 3,000 yen. Below, we explain the specific reasons from three perspectives.
Source: JDMA Sales Survey (Statistics)
1. A Rich Selection of Design Templates
Many EC site building platforms come with site templates prepared in advance. Shopify is one of them, but it offers more templates than other platforms.
Its design templates are created by companies known for site design and by many creators, with more than 1,000 templates available. As a result, you can choose a design that fits each company’s branding. Compared with platforms that hold a large share in Japan, such as “MakeShop,” the sheer number is overwhelming.
| Service | Shopify | MakeShop | BASE | STORES |
| Number of templates | 1,000+ total | 173 | 100+ total | 48 |
The table above compares the number of templates across widely used EC site building platforms. Because companies and individual creators can build and sell templates on Shopify, more templates are distributed than on other sites.
After choosing a template, you can easily change settings such as embedded images, colors, formatting, and site structure.
The screenshot below shows the Shopify site editing screen. On the left side of the image, there are features that let you add, edit, and reorder the elements that make up the site easily, without coding. Even an operations manager with no coding knowledge can embed product images and videos and change the site design with ease. Since changes stay visible only to the editor until you save, you can revise and verify the design without breaking the customer experience.
2. A Wide Range of Application Options
Plenty of Apps to Customize Your Site
On Shopify, apps are developed and sold to add a variety of features.
There are more than 3,000 apps, offering a broad range that supports site building and operation. For example, there are apps to counter cart abandonment, apps that issue coupons based on conditions you set to prevent visitors from leaving, and apps that link store and EC shop inventory to drive sales. From store design to report creation, the mechanisms needed to build an EC site are already provided, so building from scratch is rarely necessary.
Here are a few of the popular apps on Shopify.
- Order Status Tracker
An app that lets customers track an order from purchase through delivery. - Personalized Recommendations
An app that uses AI to display frequently co-purchased and related products as recommendations. - Klaviyo
An app that supports drag-and-drop email creation and lets you run email marketing efficiently to your target customers.
You can check recommended and popular apps like these anytime in the Shopify app store.
Of course you can use an app simply by installing it, and uninstalling apps is just as easy, so you can add and test features effortlessly.
Integration with Other Systems
For companies that already have an EC site, whether integration with the other systems used internally is possible is also an important consideration when renewing the site. Integration and migration work with various systems such as customer management, inventory management, and shipping is to be expected.
In that context, Shopify offers apps that enable integration with a variety of services, making it relatively easy to connect with existing systems and applications.
In addition, because companies and individual creators develop Shopify apps, applications that make Shopify even more convenient appear every day.
3. Headless Commerce Makes Expanding Sales Easier
As you operate an EC site, you will find you need to sell on new devices and marketplaces and introduce new systems to match a variety of user needs.
When that happens, adjusting the site design and changing internal systems and applications require a great deal of effort to complete. Shopify, however, supports “headless commerce,” a new form of EC site.
Headless commerce refers to a form of EC in which the frontend (the surface of the site, the pages users interact with) and the backend (the data and systems that ordinary users never see) are decoupled, allowing design and data to be managed separately. The benefits of supporting headless commerce include the following.
A Faster Site
Because the design portion of the site and the backend system are separate, you can prepare the design portion as static pages. As a result, the server does less processing when the site loads, so pages can display relatively quickly. Since improving display speed can change search rankings, it may also help with SEO. This is an important requirement for EC expansion.
Stronger Security
With headless commerce, you can manage the frontend, which handles things like the website’s design, and the backend, which handles behind-the-scenes processing, separately.
There are many cyberattacks aimed at middleware, but by making middleware inaccessible from the frontend, you can reduce the cyberattacks received through the frontend. This makes it possible to improve security. Shopify itself has also obtained “ISO27001,” an international standard for security.
Turning Web Pages into Smartphone Apps via PWA
By building the internal system in line with PWA (Progressive Web Application), a system that lets a website be installed as an app, you can turn your EC site into an app. This lets you roll out a PWA app to gauge user reactions in a simple way before considering development of a real smartphone-app version. It also reduces the effort of newly configuring and developing systems for app development, making it possible to cut costs significantly.
Flexible Integration with Various Systems
When running content marketing on an EC site, it is common to use a CMS such as WordPress to create a company-profile page while using Shopify for the EC site. Because Shopify allows systems to be connected via API, this is a relatively simple task for someone with backend development knowledge.
Being able to customize an EC site flexibly in this way is one of Shopify’s great strengths.
Conclusion
In this article we introduced renewing an EC site and switching to Shopify. With a wealth of designs and systems, you can build an EC site that matches your wishes easily and at low cost. On top of that, because Shopify offers many features that streamline future store operation, the benefits of switching to Shopify are substantial.
Shopify’s use is starting to expand in Japan as well, with the number of domestic deployments growing to two or three times the previous year each year. Amid this, Shopify’s integration with Rakuten Ichiba becoming possible made the news this year. An app that links with Rakuten was added as a Shopify app, making it possible to sync a Shopify store’s inventory information with Rakuten Ichiba.
Why not consider building a store with Shopify, which holds great potential for future expansion?
Lxgic Can Handle Everything from EC Site Building to Operation
Whether you are renewing an existing EC site with Shopify or building one from scratch, many companies lack the resources to get started right away. At Lxgic, we can propose solutions covering EC building, sales-strategy planning and design, and branding. Because we have accumulated know-how based on our past analytics data, we can build a site optimized for your company’s needs.
Beyond EC building, we also support product PR that drives traffic after launch and managed SNS operation. In the past, we used SNS to drive traffic to an EC site and recorded sales of 1,500,000 yen within five hours of launch. If you have any concerns about building a Shopify EC site or other SNS initiatives, please feel free to consult Lxgic.
