Web Scraping Services in Japan

Japanese retail competes heavily through points programmes. Shops and platforms both run multipliers, and during campaign periods those reach levels that represent a significant share of transaction value.

What price-only collection gets wrong

• Index direction can invert. A shop priced above a rival can be the better offer once a large multiplier applies.
• Promotional intensity is understated, because the promotion is not in the price field.
• Campaign periods look quiet in price data while being the most aggressive periods in the market.
• Multipliers stack — shop-level, platform campaign and card-linked — each with conditions.

We capture points rate and multiplier as separate fields with conditions where published, and record campaign context so baseline and campaign periods stay separable.

We do not convert points to currency. Their value depends on the shopper's membership tier and redemption behaviour, so a fixed conversion embeds an assumption we cannot verify and produces a confident figure that is wrong for most shoppers. Detail on our Rakuten service.

Japanese product titles mix kanji, hiragana, katakana and romanised Latin text, often within a single title. Brand names appear in multiple scripts, sometimes in the same listing.

• Raw title matching fails badly, because the same product can be written several valid ways.
• Katakana transliterations of foreign brands vary between shops.
• Pack and quantity information is embedded in title text rather than structured.
• Shop-formatted promotional text inflates titles and is not part of product identity.

We normalise across scripts, map brands in each form, extract model numbers and compare attributes, delivering a stable product key with confidence per record. Uncertain matches are flagged rather than merged, because a wrong merge hides a genuine second product.

On the privacy side, APPI has its own requirements around personal data and cross-border transfer. Our position is unchanged: public business and product data only, no personal data resale, no patient data, B2B contact data only with a documented lawful basis, and a written methodology document per source before signature. Because we exclude personal data from scope entirely, the cross-border transfer question does not arise for the data we deliver — and we would rather that be structural than contractual.