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"World Shopping BIZ", a cross-border e-commerce system that connects the world, created by gathering zig-zag people

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This website has been translated into English using automatic translation. Please note that the translation may not be entirely accurate.

Shopping online has become the norm these days. Have you ever had the experience of finding a product you wanted on an overseas site, only to find that you couldn't buy it? Overseas EC sales are called "cross-border EC," and unlike domestic EC, there are various hurdles to overcome.

More freely and easily, "across borders", people who want to buy what they want can buy what they want, and people who want to sell can sell what they want to sell.
Raise such a mission Zig-zag Inc.(hereinafter referred to as "zig-zag"), with such a mission, provides "WorldShopping BIZ," which enables cross-border EC in as little as one day. 

The use of EC is accelerating due to the influence of the new coronavirus, but when did the World Shopping BIZ have a concept and how was it born? We interviewed the representative, Mr. Kazuyoshi Nakazato.

Pursuing the same challenges from your first career

Can you tell us about your career and how you started your business?

I started my current company at the age of 41 and turned 48 this year. I think I am older than most start-up entrepreneurs. I have a long experience as a company employee. My first job was at an OOH (outdoor advertising) and spatial graphics company, my second was at a web marketing company, OPT, and my third was at a Korean capital international logistics company, where I became the president of the Japanese subsidiary. After that, I started my own company, zig-zag.

I've been involved in startups since I graduated from college, but I didn't want to start a my own so suddenlyBut what made me think, "I like the idea of being CEO, it looks like a lot of fun," was not the motive of wanting to become rich, but the fact that the CEO seems to be having the most fun while all the employees are working happily. The picture of the president smiling as he watched everyone enjoying themselves. What made the president happy was that he had created a place where people could enjoy themselves. I wanted to feel that joy, too.

It was during my time at OPT that I decided that I not only liked the idea, but actually wanted to start my own business. However, I still could not see the path to that goal. I could see the path of the Internet industry, but just because I started a business did not mean that I could suddenly become like Yahoo! So what kind of business was needed? I thought there were three key points to keep in mind: "global," "something that generates data value," and "something that is not just nice to have, but something that is necessary to have." 

Did you think it was cross-border EC?

Since my time with OPT, I had noticed that Japanese e-commerce sites were being accessed from overseas. With the advancement of translation technology, the barriers to information are getting lower and lower, and even if people can access EC sites beyond national borders and find what they want, there are still people who cannot buy it. The reason for this is the language, payment, and logistics barriers.In short, opportunity loss was occurring because of issues on the seller's side. At the time, I had knowledge of EC, but not of international logistics. I had the opportunity to become the representative director of the Japanese subsidiary of a foreign company and experienced the launch of international logistics services between Japan, the U.S., Korea, and Germany. This company was developing a business to solve the logistics part of the "language," "settlement," and "logistics" issues I mentioned earlier. This meant that the "language" and "settlement" issues remained. I wanted to solve all of them, but being in a foreign company, I could not do what I wanted to do. So I decided to leave the company when the business was on track and start my own business.

What exactly was the problem you wanted to solve?

We tend to think of language issues as translations of product pages, etc., but in fact, the problem is more about what happens from the cart screen onward. First of all, there are input issues such as kana character input forms by non-Japanese speakers and address forms that do not allow selection of a foreign country. Payment is also quite complicated for non-Japanese, such as cash on delivery and payment at convenience stores. For domestic deliveries, the customer simply needs to affix a label to the package and leave it to Yamato Transport or Sagawa Express to deliver. On the other hand, for overseas delivery, an English invoice is required first. A database is also necessary because shipping costs differ from country to country. If it is a breakable item, the packaging also needs to be changed, and it takes a lot of time and effort to do cross-border shipping, but we thought we had to solve all of these problems.

Can you tell us about your current business, including the potential of the cross-border e-commerce market?

When you think of "cross-border EC", you probably imagine opening a store in an overseas mall such as T-mall in China or eBay in the U.S. and selling your products there. However, our business domain is not limited to these overseas markets, but focuses on "web inbound" to overseas users accessing Japanese e-commerce sites.

There is an EC market of about 14 trillion yen in Japan. Assuming that the overseas access ratio to domestic e-commerce sites is 2% to 4%, there are 280 to 560 billion yen of "unbought experiences" (opportunity loss) in Japan's domestic e-commerce market. It is a waste, isn't it? Before the Corona disaster, shopping tours that actually visited Japan to shop and return were common, but in the current environment of the Corona disaster, EC has to be used. Our WorldShopping BIZ is the solution to that. The flow is very simple: insert our JavaScript tag into a Japanese EC site, and when accessed from overseas by IP address, a WorldShopping cart appears, visible only to overseas users, and payment methods such as AliPay, UnionPay, PayPal, and the overseas version of AmazonPay are provided. E-commerce site operators can implement this with a single tag line. We also provide a dedicated store dashboard for e-commerce businesses to visualize overseas access data, purchase data, and other information such as which countries and regions are accessing the site and what items are selling, which can be used for marketing purposes. You may be thinking, "Why not just open a store in a major overseas e-commerce mall?" However, it is still necessary to respond to "web inbound" access to Japanese e-commerce sites from overseas.  We are seeing an increasing number of companies that have already opened stores in overseas e-commerce malls introducing WorldShopping BIZ to their domestic sites.

credit: zig-zag

In general, the logistics of a mail-order business is stock-based (i.e., the company holds inventory in advance and ships products as soon as an order is placed). However, since we act as a purchasing and shipping agent, we receive the goods upon receipt of an order, inspect them, repackage them, and ship them to the overseas user. In other words, inventory management costs are greatly reduced. Also, since we receive money from overseas users first, cash flow is not a problem. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Is the demand for cross-border EC still increasing due to the corona disaster?

Yes, it is increasing. In particular, businesses with real stores were reluctant to cooperate with us before the Corona disaster, but now that they have been negatively affected by the Corona disaster, they have no choice but to strengthen their e-commerce activities, and we are receiving many inquiries. Our service is a business model where we receive service fees and overseas shipping fees from overseas users, so from the EC business owner's point of view, it is easy to implement with low fixed costs and little risk. The more EC sites that introduce our service, the more convenient shopping for overseas users and the higher the repeat rate for cross-border EC as a whole, so we have designed our service to be easy for EC businesses to start anyway.

Have you ever had any particular difficulties in terms of funding, including procurement, product development, offices, etc.?

The current business model itself has been in my mind for quite some time. However, it took a long time to grow. The hardest part was funding. After deciding to start a business, I presented my idea to Mr. Ebine (former chairman of OPT), my mentor from my OPT days, and he agreed to invest in the company. In the beginning, we received financial support from angels, and it took 10 months from the founding of the company until the first product came out in April 2016. We then faced a cash-out crisis in November 2016. In addition to the funds from angel, we had a few hundred thousand left from a start-up loan from Shibuya Ward and a loan from the Japan Finance Corporation. Five days before the cash-out, we were able to raise 50 million yen from a VC and we were but we were still hanging on by a thread, but the Mobile Internet Capital that invested in us at that time continued to support us with follow-on investments and hands-on support since then.

The next hardest part was the product. Although we have not pivoted our business, the current "WorldShopping BIZ" is actually our 2nd product. Our 1st product, released in April 2016, was to generate a multilingual EC site on the WorldShopping domain by linking product data from EC sites. Although there was a need for this product, the number of companies that had adopted it was slow and there were development hurdles for the companies who had adopted it. I remember how difficult it was. The person who saved us from this crisis was Imanishi, our current CTO, who was still working for us as a subcontractor at the time. I asked him if he could create a system that would allow orders to be placed without data linkage. A few days later, he came up with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). The launch of the second product was in August 2017, so we got through that time believing that what we were going to make would definitely sell. We were happy that it actually did sell. There were times during the process when we thought about doing consulting or contracted development to get us through,  but we were so confident in our product that we just focused on development. In fact, after releasing the current product in August 2017, the number of stores quickly expanded and the amount in circulation began to rise thanks to the ease of implementation with a single line of tags.

I established the company in June 2015, but until the end of December 2017, I was renting an office from a senior colleague, from which I also shipped packages overseas. So as the number of stores expanded, a lot of goods arrived at the office even though we were renting an office between us. When our goods started to take up most of the office space, we gave up renting space and moved to a new office in January 2018.

The website states that the organizational culture is "a group of independent (autonomous) human resources". Can you tell us the background behind the idea?

It was influenced by Mr. Hachimine, the founder of OPT. I have a desire to create an organization where each member, regardless of gender or country, has a wide variety of ideas and is daring, and where each member works hard and respects each other so that individual growth leads to organizational growth⸻. I wanted to provide a place where such members can thrive. And the reason why these talented members have stayed with us instead of starting their own businesses is because of our zig-zag attitude. As you can see on our website, zig-zag is actually not Japanese, but French. It is a symbol of global diversity. When I learned this, I decided to change our company name to zig-zag.

What are your thoughts on future global expansion?

We would like to promote "from Japan to the world," and in fact, we are already connected to the global market. If we expand our logistics bases overseas and change the languages we speak, we will be able to expand not only from Japan to the world but also from the world to the world. This will be a horizontal expansion of our current business model. In addition to horizontal expansion, we are also thinking of creating other services. For example, we can take advantage of the seasonal gap between the northern and southern hemispheres and sell out-of-season inventory overseas from an SDG perspective. We are also thinking about other businesses besides that kind of purchasing agency.

The world of the Internet that I jumped into when I joined a startup

What kind of person were you as a student?

I am from Okinawa Prefecture and stayed in Okinawa until junior high school. I moved to Tokyo to play baseball and spent my entire high school life immersed in baseball. However, I got burned out on baseball here and spent my university days immersed in part-time work. I was relatively independent, and perhaps I had a strong mindset of deciding on something and moving forward with it.

The axis of dreams and job hunting since childhood. Many fateful encounters

As a child, I was a "baseball player". In high school my dream was "to go to nationals". Since the high school had a strong baseball team, one of my teammates at the time actually joined the Giants. In job hunting, out of the three categories of clothing, food, and housing I focused on "housing," which I was particularly interested in. In fact, I had obtained a real estate construction license while I was still a student. Although I had received job offers from major real estate, housing, and building materials companies, I happened to find an advertising agency in a recruitment book that appealed to me. I turned down the job offer from a major company and went to work for a company called Oxplanning (now Cloudpoint). If I had not joined this company, I might have gone to a major company and been a company employee for a long time. I also experienced a sales internship at this company as part of my unofficial job offer. In fact, Mr. Fujita, who would later go on to start CyberAgent, was also a student intern in sales and inspired me with his subsequent success. In this way, my trajectory may have been quite fateful. At 29 years old, I also met Mr. Hachimine of OPT, which was still unlisted at the time, and made the decision to jump into the Internet industry.

Can you give us a message of support for startups in the seed period?

I don't want to go back to that time when I was about to cash out (laughs).
I don't want to go back to those days when we were about to run out of cash, though. To be honest, the fund-raising environment at that time was booming, and I underestimated the importance of raising funds during the seed period. I think it all depends on how much you can believe in yourself and how much you can visualize what you want to create. If you have any doubts about that, you should stop. Because you will end up involving other people's lives. Realistically speaking, we live in a world where startups that were at an event together may shut down their services after six months or a year, or in some cases, close their companies. The reasons are people, product failure, loss of money, and other hard things. I think you need to have a strong will to believe in yourself and keep going, and also have "insensitivity". You need to have the feeling that things will somehow work out, and that you will do something about it. u need to have the feeling that something will happen and that you will do something about it.

Finally, please give a few words to your readers.

We feel that Japan is still in its infancy in fostering a startup ecosystem. In order for the number of companies originating from Japan to increase and grow, it is essential for various stakeholders to appear on the scene and work together. And since the game changers are often start-ups, it is of course necessary to have the understanding of the large corporations that surround them. I hope that you will encourage an environment in which many people can take on this challenge.