Sanyo Shokai, which manufactures and sells apparel, made ecommerce strategy one of the pillars of its growth strategy, and refocused on developing its ecommerce platform, strengthening its branding, and establishing an omnichannel approach (OMO) that incorporated onlines sales with physical stores.
In the fall of 2023, the company migrated its ecommerce platform from a domestic vendor to Shopify Plus, undergoing a major renewal. They upgraded both their own mall site “SANYO ONLINE STORE” and brand site “SANYO ONLINE STORE” CRESTBRIDGE ONLINE STORE, achieving the following results year-over-year:
- GMV (gross trading volume) 115%
- CompleteEC siteofNumber of sessions 120%
- high profit marginProper product sales 120%
Now, Yusuke Saito, Sanyo Shokai's Chief Digital Strategy Officer, shares the company's experience migrating to Shopify Plus to replace the company's online sites, and talks about their strategy and future prospects.
Challenges unique to apparel businesses with multiple brands
Sanyo Shokai was established in Tokyo in 1943 during the war. The company began in 1946 with men's raincoats made from air-raid blackout curtains, and has since grown from a specialized coat manufacturer to a comprehensive apparel manufacturer.
In 2008, they opened the online store "SANYO iStore". While launching advanced ecommerce features, Sanyo Shokai encountered several challenges.
Challenge 1: Having 8 ecommerce sites made communications and site operations inefficient
The ecommerce site consists of a "mall site", divided into a total of 8 ecommerce sites, with each brand maintaining its own site. Mr. Saito looks back on those days as follows: “There were multiple touchpoints with users, leading to poor communication. It was difficult to be efficient. Each brand site required a person in charge, which made it difficult to scale while reducing human resources and costs. There was a lot of waste.
Challenge 2: Previous ecommerce platform didn't support responding to user needs and reached its limit
The second issue is that I have been using the same ecommerce platform since 2015. We had always sensed there were limits to the scalability of that platform. “The apparel industry is changing every day. It is necessary to provide services that match needs and trends, but keeping up with these changing trends required adding costly new features to our legacy platform, and we hit the limits of scalability. The site was difficult to use from a user's point of view, and the hurdles for even minor updates were getting higher." says Mr. Saito.
Challenge 3: Premium products are buried among sale products, and the company is unable to promote its strength in manufacturing.
The third issue was that it was not possible to clearly distinguish between premium products and sale products on the site. "By having sale items and special items mixed on one product page, it looked like an online site focused on sales, and we were not able showcase our premium products and brand. As the presence of upmarket products had become weak, we needed to present them in a way that clearly differentiated them," Mr. Saito recalls.
To solve these three issues, Sanyo Shokai decided to replatform onto Shopify. Since starting in web and ecommerce in 2014, Mr. Saito, says Shopify is a reliable platform used around the world. The appeal of this product was that it could be developed at a relatively low cost and in a shorter lead time than domestic vendors."
Renewal of the e-commerce site for a company like ours, which has multiple brands and has been operating its online site for over 10 years, requires a fundamental review of the system. For example, payments, inventory allocation, shipping instructions, etc. can be linked with existing systems. No matter how well we do with the website, I can't implement all of these components.
"Refactoring is conceptually simple, but it inevitably costs money. Normally, for renewals, the person in charge of ecommerce first needs to go through internal approvals, but if they suddenly present a huge budget, internal approval will not be obtained and the project itself will not be able to get started. Next, we needed to ensure front-end renovation costs were kept as low as possible. Shopify Plus is highly scalable; we thought that we could keep costs down and have low hurdles for implementation, and that we could start with visible improvements to the front end and then revamp the back end as well." says Mr. Saito.
Results: Significantly reduced operating costs and an ecommerce site with OMO and brand awareness realized
As a result of implementing Shopify Plus, the operating costs of our ecommerce site have decreased. "It was possible to significantly reduce costs", said Mr. Saito. "By integrating our sites, we consolidated the number of people in charge to a smaller number and streamlined the operation of the e-commerce site, which also led to cost reductions. Additionally, Shopify Plus is easy to use; employees without specialized training can now update the site while maintaining the brand image, and employees from other departments can now quickly collect the data they need. I believe this will lead to improved digital literacy throughout the company."
Furthermore, by introducing Shopify Plus and integrating e-commerce sites for each brand, we were able to increase customer traffic. In addition to the synergistic effect, a new home page has been set up on the site that allows us to separate our premium branded products from sale products. Differentiation was also achieved.
Comparing to before the migration, we were able to achieve
- GMV (gross trading volume) 115%
- Number of sessions on all EC sites 120%
- 120% sales of proper products with high profit margins
Let's take a closer look at the features of Shopify Plus that supported these.
Enhanced in-store try-on experience with OMO function, usage rate 5 times higher than previous
The highlight of the replacement was "TRY&PICK". Users can try on products they are interested in from the online store at a designated physical store. Store try-on was the introduction of a service.
With this store-linked OMO service, when you select a product you want to try on online, you can also make detailed settings that allow you to select in-store services in advance, such as "I want a coordination suggestion" or "I want to know how to care for the product."
Usage of this new feature is about 5 times higher than our previous "layaway service". And, it also increased the number of customers from ecommerce sites visiting our physical stores. It worked.
The landing page builder app “PageFly” allowed for creating 2000 pages created in less than a year
One of the attractions of Shopify is that it is extensible and allows you to install just the apps that suit your company from over 8,000 apps on the Shopify App Store. For example, PageFly allows you to easily create various pages to match the theme of your online site. You can easily create an LP (landing page) with no code, even without specialized knowledge.
Mr. Saito states, “In the approximately one year since the Shopify migration, we have created over 2,000 pages. We have integrated each brand site, "SANYO ONLINE STORE" into an integrated media platform, we built pages for each brand within the store, and it was easy to design according to the tone of the brand, and we were able to create a light structure while ensuring quality. If you outsource everything, the cost will increase and the schedule will be extended, but this problem is also solved.", he explains.
Using "expansion stores" to meet the expectations of local fans
Utilizing the "Expansion Store" feature unique to Shopify Plus, we have added stores dedicated to limited-time sales and events, such as local sales. “It was only held in certainly locations. Local sales also could now be held online. Until now, the event had to be held only in major cities, but by holding it online, we are now able to meet the needs of fans in rural areas." highlights Mr. Saito.
Renewal builds on the foundation to create even more OMO experiences
After migration, the company is continuing to grow and produce results, and it says it is only at the first stage where the foundation has been completed. Finally, Mr. Saito talks about the future prospects of using Shopify Plus as follows.
“I think of the growth achieved from replatforming so far as just the starting line. In the future, for the next phase, we will, for example, make it multilingual so that we can respond to international demand, and create an environment where users can shop around online and stores more stress-free. After replacing with Shopify, we were able to build a good foundation, including organizing the behind-the-scenes data. I would also like to work on seamlessly linking stores and ecommerce.” he said emphatically.