Japan Centre
Results within the first 3 months of going live with BigCommerce
Japan Centre’s ecommerce team chose gpmd as their strategic agency partner to support their headless BigCommerce site build, consult on technical strategy and collaborate with their frontend team and UX designer
Increase in revenue
Increase in conversio
Increase in order value
About Japan Centre
Since 1976 Japan Centre has been synonymous with authentic and high-quality Japanese products. It was founded as a hub for the Japanese community in the UK and has grown immensely over the past decades. The business not only sells Japanese products but also operates a food hall and fresh deli for its London visitors. The brand’s mission is to bring authentic Japanese flavours to its customers and provide Omotenashi, the Japanese spirit of hospitality and wholeheartedly welcoming their guests.
The brand successfully expanded its business, creating the Japan Centre Group, which encompasses the physical stores, the online shop Japancentre.com, Japan Centre Ichiba, Japan Centre Wholesale, Shoryu and Ramen Yokocho. These brands come under the renowned Japan Centre Group, which sells a range of products, including fresh and prepared food items, homeware goods, manga, magazines and gifts.
Challenge
Having grown successfully, Japan Centre’s online presence needed a scalable solution to take the brand to the next level. The key challenges that the brand faced were:
- The bespoke legacy platform and tech stack was becoming increasingly harder to maintain and develop new features on.
- The manual overhead and unique skill set needed to improve the bespoke platform was becoming harder to find, making it very challenging for the team to optimise or develop it further.
- Japan Centre wanted to ensure a unified and seamless customer experience across its off and online channels.
Regarding design strategy, the brand had embarked on an ambitious redesign project with their in-house design team, experienced UX designer Chris Constantine and frontend engineer Niall King. Merinda Taylor (Head of Digital and Ecommerce at Japan Centre) was looking to partner with an agency that could collaborate with the frontend and UX design team, help advise on and implement complex integrations and deliver the headless backend for a high-quality ecommerce site.
Solution
Japan Centre chose GPMD as their strategic agency partner to support them with the site overhaul and consult on technical strategy. GPMD focused on building the backend and integrations whilst working closely with the Japan Centre frontend team and UX design consultant Chris.
GPMD also played a critical strategic role in helping Japan Centre select the best tech stack for long-term performance, implementing third-party integrations, and informing on architectural decisions throughout the implementation phase.
Tech Stack
To offer Japan Centre a powerful and best-in-class tech stack, GPMD connected a suite of complex integrations from leading technologies in the industry.
These included:
- Algolia for AI-automated search
- Amplience, a headless content management tool
- ShipperHQ for rule-based shipping
- Shipstation as the shipping provider
- Zonos for tax management
- Verify My Age for age verification
- Apio, GPMD’s iPaaS for integrations
- A custom Nominated Delivery Day application, built by GPMD
- A headless backend server, built by GPMD
