Building the business behind Decathlon Japan’s online store

Career experience at Decathlon Japan. Not a KumaBits client engagement.

I started on Decathlon Japan’s online store as a web merchandiser, publishing products for one of our sports. We were a small team working with an adapted Magento site and external support.

At first, we wanted to see whether customers in Japan would buy our products. Purchases and reviews helped us make the case for a small physical retail lab and, later, a full-format store.

By the time we opened that store and I became e-commerce director, the ambition had changed. We wanted to build a much bigger online business. I was now responsible for leading that growth.

Choosing Shopify and owning the integrations

In our Magento setup, many changes still required PHP development, and technical resources were limited. We compared Shopify with the corporate alternatives. One offered limited improvement; another’s running costs and resource requirements were too high for our scale at the time.

Shopify gave us a way to evolve progressively: improve the customer experience, add capabilities and give the commerce team more responsibility as it grew. We would have to build and maintain the integrations with Decathlon’s internal systems. Before committing, we checked that Shopify’s APIs would let us do that.

Val deserves a mention here. Our IT lead was resourceful, knew how to find support across the organisation, and taught me a huge amount. My confidence in him mattered when we decided the integration work was a risk worth taking.

Building together, with Japan leading the PIM

The US was already trying Shopify, and Australia was moving in the same direction as Japan. We joined forces on parts of the development and made the case for that collaboration to our local and central teams. In 2019, we migrated to Shopify.

Japan led the development of the product information management tool, or PIM. Product information came from several Decathlon systems, with translations and updates arriving at different times. The PIM gathered and prepared it for Shopify. I defined the business requirements; my colleague built the tool and the integrations.

New products and updates arrived automatically, with publication conditions including stock, Japanese content and a price. I insisted that our web marketers could override individual fields locally when corrections were needed. We were responsible for what customers saw on our store, wherever the information came from.

We also worked on retrieving reviews from the central systems and linking them to products, so that reviews from Japan could appear first. Local customer feedback was more relevant to the experience we wanted to build.

Australia adopted the PIM, and other Decathlon operations later reused it. The work we needed in Japan became something other teams could build on.

Giving the commerce team more ways to act

With Shopify, the commerce team could change pages faster, add payment methods and use dashboards to understand the business. Shopify Flow let them automate routine tasks without code, such as changing product visibility. They could take on more of the day-to-day operation without needing custom development for each change.

As we added skills, we could use more of that flexibility. Specialists in SEO, on-site search, paid acquisition, logistics and supply, data analysis and technical support helped us attract customers, improve how they found products and have stock available at the right time.

Keeping our effort focused

I also had to keep our effort focused. There was always another product page we could improve. We corrected errors wherever they appeared, while concentrating deeper editorial work on products we believed could become bestsellers. With thousands of products, knowing where to stop editing was part of running the business.

By the time I left to join Shopify in 2022, our e-commerce team had grown from two people in 2019 to twelve, and annual e-commerce revenue was five times its 2019 level. Physical stores also helped that growth, alongside the skills and capabilities we had built online.

I had started by putting products on a website. Together, we built the business behind it—and a team with the means to take it further.

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