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Japanese web design is renowned for its distinctive features with a lot of text and busy layout. When you type “Japanese web design” into Reddit‘s search engine, plenty of topics appear! Also, the professionals have already wrote on this topic:

 ・ How Japanese Website Design Differs From The West  by Info Cubic Japan 

 ・ The truth about Japanese web design  by Multilingual Magazine

 ・Customers expect detailed information” in Customer Expectations and Behavior in Japan  by Rakuten 

Let’s leave the reasoning to them as it makes no difference to the situation. What we should consider here for the international brands who are aiming Japanese market is whether if it’s needed to build a new website from scratch exclusively for Japan in order to attract the market?

When comparing the official online stores of luxury brands for the origin countries and Japan, many of them use the same or similar style.

 ・ Tiffany US  vs  Tiffany JP

 ・ GUCCI IT  vs  GUCCI JP

  ・Louis Vuitton FR  vs  Louis Vuitton JP

It makes sense as what they sell is the brand value and brand image as well as the high quality of the products, and their customer must feel it when purchase. Is it, however, always the best way? Can other non-luxury brands apply the same strategy? I found an interesting example. It is a successful adaption that makes use of the assets from the original site.

The article by Nikkei xTECH said, according to IDC Japan’s report on the analysis of the domestic traditional PC market* in Q2 2021,  the group of Lenovo, NEC, and Fujitsu had a 36.8% market share followed by HP Japan with 16.0%, Dell (14.1%), Apple (8.6%), and Sharp (dynabook) (7.3%).
HP is the best-selling brand on its own, outperforming many domestic brands in Japan. Part of successful strategy plans can be seen on the online store of them.

As an example, let’s compare the US and Japanese versions of the HP Pavilion Plus 14 inch PDP. When opening the two pages, you can see the difference right away from the top. While the US page begins with image-focused storytelling, the top of the Japanese page is a Japanese online store like product details.

 JP  HP Pavilion Plus 14 inch PDP

 US  HP Pavilion Plus 14 inch PDP
 

 

These pages appear to be completely different at first glance, yet by scrolling down, you’ll find the JP page takes components and concepts from the US version and adapts the order, layout, and localization for their customers.

US

JP

In order to fulfill the demands of the detail-oriented Japanese customers, the JP page inserts many more modules compared to the US page, resulting in significantly differing page lengths.

Some of the additional modules appear to be based on US assets that are not displayed on the US page, while others look to be Japanese originals. It is possible that they prepare a sufficient number of assets to meet the demands of branches in various regions and then let local branches determine what and how to utilise them, as well as allow them to create their own modules.

 

Consumers are likely to feel that understanding tech specs of products like laptops is complicated, and it actually depends on the consumer’s behavior as to what information is necessary on the PDP. It’s apparently better to make the format of the page familiar so that it is comfortable to them as the revenue in the Laptops market in Japan amounts to USD3.9bn in 2023, according to the data of Statista. Japan is not particularly easy for foreign brands, but if they can achieve success, they’ve got a good potential.

That is an example of a laptop PDP. As previously indicated, some brands consider that it is best not to make too many changes to the original site. As a result, it appears that the strategy for selling in Japan must be highly depend on the type of the product and carefully planned. Balance must be essential for the merchandise from high-street brands, for example.

 

Detailed report on related topics can be generated upon request.

 

* consisting of desktop PCs, notebook PCs, and workstations in the domestic traditional PC market 

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Japanese Market

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