A new Shopify storefront built for the Japanese market from scratch. Not a translation of the Western site: a different type system, a different information density, and mobile designed first because that is where nearly all the traffic was going to come from.
The 390px layout was the primary artboard. Desktop was derived from it, not the other way round.
Placeholder copy in the mockups. The real storefront is live in Japanese; nothing here is client content.
Translation was the smallest part of it.
Japanese runs on Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN at a light weight, not the Latin grotesque the other storefronts use. Line height goes up, letter spacing loosens, and headings sit lower in the size scale because kanji carry more weight per character.
Japanese has no spaces, so a browser breaks a line anywhere it likes. Headings and short paragraphs carry manual break points so a phrase never splits mid-word. Tedious, and immediately obvious when it is missing.
Western eCommerce trends push toward sparse pages and a lot of empty space. The shoppers I spoke to read that as evasive. Shipping thresholds, packaging discretion, payment security and delivery timing all sit high on the page, stated plainly.
Three guarantees run directly under the header on both breakpoints: free shipping over a stated amount, discreet nationwide delivery, encrypted checkout. It is the first thing a new visitor sees, before any product.
A blog block sits on the homepage rather than buried in a menu. Buying guides answer the beginner questions that stop a first order, which matters more in a market where the category is researched quietly.
Prices are set in yen at round local numbers, not currency-converted from euros. A price that ends in an odd figure reads like an import, and an import reads like a customs risk.
I did not know this market when I started. So I went and found out.
Weeks of going through Japanese eCommerce sites section by section: how they structure headers, where they put trust signals, how dense their product grids run, what a Japanese checkout is expected to look like. The patterns are consistent and they are not the Western ones.
I interviewed Japanese consumers about what they actually look for before buying online. Most of the decisions on this page came out of those conversations rather than a best-practice article: what they check first, what makes them close a tab, what they need stated before they trust a store they have never used.
The launch came with a work trip to Japan for an industry convention. Seeing how things are presented in person, on shelves and on signage and on the phones of people around me, sharpened the design in ways reading about it did not.
The storefront launched on Shopify and now runs as its own market rather than a translated branch of the Western sites. The transferable lesson was cheap to learn and easy to forget: a market you have not lived in will not tell you what it wants through analytics alone. You have to go and ask.