Japan Center

Japan Centre is a London based Japanese grocer and retail group, selling Japanese food, drink, tableware, books and gifts online alongside physical sites at Leicester Square, the Ichiba food hall in Westfield Stratford City, and shops in Finchley, Golders Green, Kingston, Swiss Cottage and West Acton. The online shop lists roughly 2,000 products across close to 290 categories and around 190 maker pages, priced in pounds. The site is a single page React application over BigCommerce, published in English and Japanese.

Website Design

Roboto with Japanese fallbacks. The type stack is Roboto and M PLUS 1p, falling through to Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro, Meiryo and MS PGothic. The same stack serves both language versions, so the Japanese site renders in the identical layout without a separate design.

Red on grey. A hot red, #ef3e2f, with a lighter #ff5751 for secondary states, is the only strong colour. Everything else is neutral: the two text tokens are set as #343434 and #777776, with #e6e7e9 and #f9f9f9 for panels and dividers.

Client rendered throughout. Every page, product and category pages included, is served from one small HTML shell and drawn in the browser, so the entire catalogue sits behind a single template.

Shopping Experience

Five departments, then a deep ingredient tree. The top level is Groceries, Drinks, Lifestyle and Gifts, Gifts for Kids, and Magazines Books and Crafts. Below that the taxonomy gets very specific: red miso, white miso, barley miso and instant miso soup are separate categories, as are dashi noodle stock and tsuyu, bonito, kombu kelp, mochi, origami, calligraphy, teaware, and chopsticks and cutlery.

Grocery data on every record. Product records carry net weight and unit, a pack description, country of origin, a best before date, and separate online and warehouse stock counts, alongside ingredients, nutrition, preparation and usage fields. Gift wrapping is offered at item level.

Search and reviews run as services. Algolia powers search and its analytics, Reviews.io supplies the rating snippets, and a OneTrust notice handles consent, so the front end stays a thin shell over bought-in components.

Brand Storytelling

Editorial sits beside the aisles. The site carries roughly 350 recipes, a blog, and Know-how guides grouped by confectionery, cooking ingredients, drinks, tableware and other. A further set of explainer pages covers single ingredients: sake, ramen, udon, panko, soy sauce, furikake, Japanese vinegar, Japanese rice and Japanese tea.

Company pages make the sourcing argument. Authentic Products, Delivering Inspiration, History of Japan Centre, Japan Centre People and Wholesale Suppliers each get a permanent page rather than being folded into one About block.

Notable Features

Bilingual by URL. English and Japanese versions sit under /en and /ja with hreflang pairs across the sitemap, blog posts included.

Maker pages as a browse axis. Close to 190 producers have pages of their own, so a shopper can move from one item to everything else that maker supplies.

Locations include the food counters. Alongside the shops, the location directory lists a mochi bar and the Ichiba mochi donut bar, treating in-store counters as destinations in their own right.