In my UX research for how to improve traffic to my own website Whalefolio I came across Alexa Siteinfo. It’s an Amazon company that lets you type in any address and get analytics on that website’s traffic. On their site they market themselves as:
“Alexa is more than just the traffic rank you know and love from its early days. Checking website traffic and rank is the basis for uncovering actionable ideas to grow your business.”
To do some competitive analysis I decided to type in various websites for other cryptocurrency portfolio trackers. For fun I put in random websites and soon came across some interesting results.
It turns out that the top luxury e-commerce fashion sites get a significant amount of hits from Japan. Sometimes more than half their traffic!
This was a complete surprise to me because I have been on some of these sites before but there has been no indication that they even target Japanese. I decided to look into this some more.
I navigated over to each sites main, editorial, or lookbook page where I would find the section typically showing off the most models.
I looked at the Top 7 e-commerce luxury sites and here is a table summary of my findings:
Out of a total of 223 models faces I came across I saw 6 Asians. That is a whooping laughable 2.69%!
You can see that even with a significant amount of hits from Japan these sites do not even make a real effort to further capitalise on Japanese shoppers. If you have travelled to Japan you will know that most of the population there are not particularly well versed in English. I find it quite strange that only 2 of these offer Japanese language versions of their sites based off these results.
Over 60% of Mytheresa visitors are Japanese but there is no Japanese language support? Are you kidding me?!
There may be some other fashion industry factors at play here where generally it is accepted that Asian models aren’t showcased. Even so I find it incredulous that there is such an under misrepresentation of Asians.
What would the effects on sales be if there were more targeted effort involved in promoting to Japanese?
