arukutomaru: a cross-border shop whose main market is now Korea

A small shop selling around 30 products worldwide. After we rebuilt it in five languages so that people could find it from search, it went from 80% Japanese buyers to Korea leading on both visits and revenue.

The problem it solves

The problem this project set out to solve was not cost. It was which country’s customers find the shop. arukutomaru used to run on an off-the-shelf shop service, and back then 80% of its buyers were Japanese. The products themselves sell perfectly well abroad, so we took the view that they simply were not being found, and put languages and being findable from overseas search at the centre of the rebuild.

Customers from Korea grew from there, and today Korea leads on both visits and revenue. People who never saw the shop while it was Japanese-only now arrive on it straight from search.

Two things made leaving the off-the-shelf shop service worthwhile. One is control over how languages are presented: deciding which language goes live when, and how the URLs are split, is the ground that overseas search work stands on. The other is payments, where Stripe charges less per transaction than platforms such as STORES and pays the money out sooner.

What we cared about

Findable from search, in the customer’s own language. The shop serves Japanese, English, Korean, Chinese and Thai, and each language has its own pages. When somebody in Korea searches in Korean, the Korean product page is what appears. A shop that merely switches its display with a button gives search engines nothing to find.

No language ships before its copy is ready. Listing a language whose translation is not finished publishes pages that are still in English. Search engines read those as recycled duplicates and show them less, not more. A language joins only once its copy exists.

No waiting, wherever the customer is. Product pages are prepared in advance and delivered from locations around the world. Time spent waiting for a page to open turns directly into customers who close the tab.

The people running it can update it themselves. Products and photos are managed from an admin screen, and articles from an editing tool. Changing a line of copy does not require a developer.