In Japan where we are, the situation is probably not as bad as other countries, but like almost anywhere, restaurants and cafés are having a very difficult time.
If you are in the Restaurants industry, Uber eats is maybe not the only solution for you.
Here are a few things we have seen from Japanese Restaurants and things we can share with you to start selling online and getting revenues fast.
First of all, you need a platform to add your products / services online.
You can sell frozen meats, you can sell catering services, what you need is a shop to manage your products and to manage orders.
Based in Japan, to sell locally, we recommend 2 platforms: Shopify (disclaimer: this is an affiliate link - we know Shopify well and we can help you setting up your store if needed) and BASE.
-Since a few weeks, Shopify is free for 90 days. After that, Shopify is 29USD per month or more, depending on the features you need.
-BASE is free to use, you pay only commissions on orders paid by credit card (3,6% + 40 yen per order).
You might need some applications to add some features to your store. One example could be an app to let your customer choosing day and delivery time.
Here is the link to the BASE App Store.
And here is a link to the very complete Shopify App Store.
Here at Ship&co, we help to connect your BASE or Shopify Store to your shipping carrier. We easily connect to Yamato, Sagawa or YuPack.
Yamato and Sagawa provide very efficient fresh and frozen delivery services as well as same day delivery in some cities.
Here is a short video showing how to print a label on Ship&co with a Shopify order and Sagawa.
Some inspirations from Restaurants going online:
Yakiniku Hiromiya / 焼肉ヒロミヤ (Tokyo, Shinjuku). This Japanese barbecue restaurant started to sell online last Saturday. They sell a set of 600g of meats every day since then, at 3pm and apparently, they are sold out after a few minutes only every single day.
They have a huge fans base with 15k followers on Twitter which help a lot, of course, but their home page (free, on google page) is very very simple and they have only 2 items on their store, which is on BASE.
Elio Locanda Italiana. A famous restaurant of delicious south-Italian food near Hanzomon in Tokyo. Opened in 1996, Elio just launched their online store to order food to pick-up or for delivery. Elio is using Shopify for their store.
We'll update this post soon with more examples of restaurants going online.
Make sure to contact us if you have questions about selling online, we are happy to help: hello@shipandco.com
About Ship&co
Ship&co is a global shipping platform designed by and for e-commerce sellers. Created by the team behind Bento&co, who have been selling on Shopify since 2008, Ship&co provides a simple and easy-to-use web dashboard and shipping API. Ship&co helps online sellers ship packages faster by automatically syncing orders and creating shipping labels and invoices in minutes. With Ship&co, you can create shipping labels for FedEx, UPS, DHL, NinjaVan, Yamato, Sagawa, and more, with just two clicks to complete the process and mark your orders as shipped. For more information on Ship&co, visit shipandco.com or reach out to us via hello@shipandco.com !