Can a foreign company open a BASE shop in Japan?

Not with an overseas address. BASE's own help centre states plainly that "現状、海外の住所にてご登録いただくことはできません" — currently you cannot register with an overseas address — and that payouts go only to a bank account at a Japanese bank. The one exception BASE itself describes is a co-operator resident in Japan: if that person will genuinely take responsibility for managing and operating the shop, they can be the seller of record and run it. Read what that sentence actually asks for before treating it as a workaround. It is not a nominee arrangement or a mailing address. The Japan-resident person becomes the party the platform holds accountable, the party named to consumers under the Specified Commercial Transactions Act, and the party whose bank account receives your revenue. That is a governance and trust decision about a specific human being, not a registration field, and it is the reason most overseas brands end up on a different platform rather than on BASE.

Is BASE actually cheaper than Shopify?

Only for small stores, and the band is narrower than the word "free" suggests. BASE's Standard plan has no monthly fee but takes 3.6% + ¥40 per transaction as a payment fee plus a 3% service fee — 6.6% plus ¥40 an order. Shopify Basic is ¥4,850 a month on monthly billing with a 3.55% online card rate through Shopify Payments. Setting those equal, BASE Standard stops being the cheaper option somewhere around ¥110,000 to ¥140,000 in monthly sales, depending on average order value — lower with small baskets, because the flat ¥40 bites harder. Below that BASE genuinely is cheaper. Above it the percentage compounds against you every month. Two things narrow the band further: BASE charges ¥250 per payout plus a ¥500 handling fee when the payout is under ¥20,000, which lands hardest on exactly the small, frequent-payout stores where BASE otherwise wins; and the comparison assumes you can use Shopify Payments, which a brand with no Japan registration cannot.

Does Shopify require a Japanese company to sell in Japan?

The store does not. Shopify Payments does. Shopify's own requirements page for Japan says a business must be registered in Japan and have a Japanese business address, and that the settlement account is a 普通預金 (futsu) account held at a bank in Japan and denominated in yen; individuals must reside in Japan. So a foreign brand with no Japan entity can open and run the storefront, but cannot process payments through Shopify's first-party rail. The practical route is a third-party gateway such as KOMOJU, whose help centre publishes a dedicated article on how overseas businesses apply. That distinction — the store is open, the money rail is not — is the whole reason Shopify remains available to foreign brands when BASE does not. We have covered the broader entity question separately in our guide to whether you need a Japan entity at all.

Which platform handles Japanese payment methods like konbini and PayPay better?

BASE, and this is the genuinely uncomfortable part of the comparison. BASE's bundled かんたん決済 covers credit cards, konbini and Pay-easy, bank transfer, carrier billing, PayPal, Amazon Pay, PayPay and PAY ID deferred payment out of the box. Shopify Payments in Japan does not natively list konbini, PayPay or carrier billing; reaching them means adding a gateway like KOMOJU, which then triggers the external transaction fee above. So the platform that is more native to Japanese buying habits on day one is the platform most foreign brands cannot open, and the platform they can open needs an extra integration and an extra fee to reach the same payment methods. That is not a reason to reverse the decision — an unavailable platform is not an option regardless of how good its payment coverage is — but it does tell you where to spend your setup effort. If you go the Shopify route, treat local payment coverage as a launch requirement rather than a later optimisation, because deferred payment and konbini are not fringe preferences in Japan.

BASE vs Shopify Japan: Which Can a Foreign Brand Open?

Q: What is the 2% external transaction fee on Shopify, and does it apply to me?

It applies to you specifically if you are a foreign brand, which is why it deserves more attention than it usually gets. Shopify's Japan pricing page lists an 外部サービスの取引手数料 — an external service transaction fee — of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. It is charged by Shopify on top of whatever your gateway charges, whenever you take payment through anything other than Shopify Payments. A Japanese seller does not pay it on orders settled through Shopify Payments — though they do pay it on orders routed through an added gateway to reach konbini or PayPay. A foreign brand that cannot qualify for Shopify Payments pays it on every order, because every order goes through the gateway. The consequence is that plan upgrades work differently for you than for a domestic merchant. Moving from Basic to Grow costs ¥8,650 more a month and, for a domestic seller on Shopify Payments, saves only 0.15% on card rate — worth it around ¥5.8 million in monthly sales. For a foreign brand on a third-party gateway, the same upgrade cuts the external fee from 2% to 1%, so it pays for itself around ¥865,000 a month. Nearly seven times lower. Your gateway's own rate is identical on both plans and drops out of the comparison entirely.

A boundary first, because this article deliberately does not re-argue things we have already published. Whether an own store beats a marketplace at all is a different decision, and the Shopify-versus-marketplace comparisons live in Rakuten versus Shopify and Amazon Japan versus Shopify. This article assumes you have already decided you want your own Japanese storefront, and asks a narrower question: of the two platforms most often shortlisted for that job, which one can a foreign brand actually operate?

The Fee Comparison Everyone Runs

Start with the arithmetic, because it is what draws brands to BASE and it deserves an honest answer before we complicate it.

BASE publishes two plans. Standard has no monthly fee and charges a payment fee of 3.6% + ¥40 per transaction plus a 3% service fee — call it 6.6% plus ¥40 an order. Growth costs ¥19,980 a month on monthly billing (¥16,580 a month equivalent if paid annually), charges 2.9% with no per-order fixed fee, and drops the service fee to zero. Shopify's Japan plans are ¥4,850, ¥13,500 and ¥58,500 a month on monthly billing, with Shopify Payments card rates of 3.55%, 3.4% and 3.25%. We are not going to re-derive Shopify's plan table here — our Rakuten versus Shopify comparison already lays it out, and our guide to Japan ecommerce pricing models puts it alongside the marketplaces.

Set BASE Standard against Shopify Basic and solve for the crossover. BASE's rate advantage is that it charges no monthly fee; Shopify's is that it takes roughly three percentage points less per order. The point where ¥4,850 a month stops being worth avoiding lands somewhere around ¥110,000 to ¥140,000 in monthly sales — nearer the bottom of that range with small baskets, because the flat ¥40 per order weighs more heavily on a ¥3,000 basket than a ¥10,000 one.

That is a much lower ceiling than "free plan" implies. A store doing ¥1.5 million a year is already inside that band, and past it entirely at small basket sizes. And two smaller items push the crossover lower still:

Payout costs. BASE charges ¥250 per transfer, plus a ¥500 handling fee when the payout is under ¥20,000. A small store taking frequent payouts pays ¥750 to move less than ¥20,000 — a cost that falls hardest on exactly the stores in the band where BASE is otherwise winning.
BASE's own upgrade. Growth's ¥19,980 a month cuts the rate by 3.7 points and removes the ¥40 per order entirely — its payment fee is a flat percentage with no fixed per-transaction amount. That pays for itself at around ¥400,000 to ¥490,000 in monthly sales depending on basket size (roughly ¥330,000 to ¥405,000 on annual billing). Useful to know, because by the time Growth makes sense you are well past the point where Shopify Basic was already cheaper than Standard.

So the fee answer is: BASE is genuinely cheaper for a small store and stops being cheaper sooner than most people expect. Now the part that decides it.

BASE Will Not Register an Overseas Address

BASE's help centre answers this directly, and the wording leaves little room: 「現状、海外の住所にてご登録いただくことはできません」 — currently, you cannot register with an overseas address. A separate help article states that registration and operation cannot be carried out on the information of a person residing overseas, and that payouts are limited to a bank account at a Japanese bank.

BASE does describe one route through. If you have a co-operator resident in Japan who will responsibly manage and operate the shop, that person can be the seller and run it. Read that sentence for what it asks rather than as a loophole. The Japan-resident person is not lending you an address; they become the party the platform holds accountable, the name and address shown to consumers under the Specified Commercial Transactions Act — which applies to your storefront regardless of where you are based — and the holder of the bank account your revenue lands in.

If you already have a Japanese subsidiary, a resident representative, or a long-standing partner who will genuinely take that role, BASE is open to you and the fee comparison above is the real decision. If what you have is a contact willing to let you use their details, you are not solving an eligibility problem, you are creating a liability and control problem — money arriving in someone else's account, a legal identity you do not hold, and a shop that can be closed without you. That is not a trade a brand should make to avoid ¥4,850 a month.

Not sure which of these gates your business actually clears? Tell us your entity situation and where your money needs to land, and we will map which platforms are genuinely open to you.

Talk to LAUNOVA

Shopify's Gate Is on the Money, Not the Store

Shopify has a Japan requirement too, and the difference is where it sits.

Shopify's own requirements page for Japan states that a business must be registered in Japan with a Japanese business address, that individual (non-corporate) applicants must reside in Japan, and that the settlement account must be a 普通預金 account held at a bank in Japan and denominated in yen. That reads like the same wall BASE puts up. It is not, because it governs Shopify Payments, not the Shopify store.

A foreign company with no Japan entity can open the storefront, put it on a Japanese domain, sell in yen and ship to Japanese customers. What it cannot do is settle through Shopify's first-party payment rail. The fallback is a third-party gateway — KOMOJU being one commonly used for Japan, and its help centre publishes an article specifically on how overseas businesses apply, so the path is documented rather than improvised. We were not able to retrieve that article's body directly (the help centre returned a 403 to our fetcher), so we are not restating its document list here; confirm current requirements with KOMOJU before planning around them.

This is the structural difference that decides the article. Both platforms have a Japan-presence requirement, but BASE's sits at account creation and Shopify's sits at settlement — and only one of those has a supported workaround that does not require handing your business to a named individual. For the wider question of when a Japan entity is worth forming anyway, see our guide on whether you need a Japan entity for ecommerce; if you do form one, the consumption tax registration question arrives with it.

The 2% Only Foreign Sellers Pay

Taking the gateway route has a cost that is easy to miss because it does not appear in any gateway's rate card. Shopify's Japan pricing page lists an 外部サービスの取引手数料 — an external service transaction fee — charged when you take payment through anything other than Shopify Payments:

Basic: 2%
Grow: 1%
Advanced: 0.6%

This is Shopify's fee, charged on top of whatever your gateway charges. A Japanese merchant never pays it on orders settled through Shopify Payments — though, per the section below, they do pay it on any order they route through an added gateway to reach konbini or PayPay. A foreign brand that cannot qualify for Shopify Payments pays it on every order, because every order goes through the gateway. Our pricing models guide flags its existence; what follows is the consequence nobody draws out.

Plan upgrades work differently for you than for a domestic merchant. Moving from Basic to Grow costs ¥8,650 more per month on monthly billing. For a domestic seller on Shopify Payments, the upgrade buys a card-rate cut from 3.55% to 3.4% — 0.15 points — so it breaks even at roughly ¥5.8 million in monthly sales. For a foreign brand on a third-party gateway, the same upgrade cuts the external fee from 2% to 1% — a full point — so it breaks even at roughly ¥865,000 in monthly sales.

Nearly seven times lower. And the comparison is cleaner than it looks: your gateway's own processing rate is the same on both plans, so it cancels out of the crossover entirely and you do not need to know it to run this calculation. On annual billing the foreign-brand crossover falls to about ¥645,000 a month.

The practical instruction is simple. Standard advice says start on Basic and upgrade when you outgrow it. If you are a foreign brand paying the external fee, you outgrow Basic far earlier than the advice assumes — around ¥865,000 a month rather than ¥5.8 million — and staying on Basic out of frugality quietly costs you more than the upgrade would.

Local Payment Methods Run the Opposite Way

Here is the part of the comparison that does not flatter the conclusion, and it is worth stating plainly rather than burying.

BASE's bundled かんたん決済 covers, out of the box: credit cards, konbini and Pay-easy, bank transfer, carrier billing, PayPal, Amazon Pay, PayPay, and PAY ID deferred payment. No integration, no second vendor, no additional platform fee. Shopify Payments in Japan does not natively list konbini, PayPay or carrier billing among its customer payment methods — reaching them means the gateway route, which means the external transaction fee above. This is documented across our own guides too; the Shopify Japan localization checklist treats local payment coverage as a launch item for exactly this reason.

So the platform that is more native to Japanese buying habits on day one is the one most foreign brands cannot open, and the one they can open needs an extra integration and an extra fee to match it. That does not reverse the decision — a platform you are not eligible for is not an option no matter how good its payment coverage — but it should change your sequencing. Treat Japanese payment coverage as a launch requirement, not a later optimisation. Deferred payment and convenience-store payment are not fringe preferences in Japan, and a checkout offering only international credit cards is not a localised checkout. That work is the substance of Shopify Japan localization as a discipline, and it is where a Shopify build most often falls short of a BASE store that got it for free.

One Market or Two Storefronts

A narrower structural point, since this comparison is specifically about a Japan-only store.

BASE is built for the Japanese domestic market. Its admin is Japanese, and its English and foreign-currency support arrives through a free app that switches the shop's own pages and confirmation emails to English and displays prices in a range of currencies — but which does not translate the product names and descriptions you enter. That is a display layer over a Japanese store, not a second storefront, and merchant-entered copy is still your job either way. Shopify is built to run multiple markets from one admin.

If your Japan store is genuinely standalone — separate catalogue, separate pricing, Japanese-language operation — that difference costs you little and BASE's simplicity is a real advantage. If your Japan store needs to stay in step with a global catalogue, it matters a great deal. The full architecture decision, one global storefront versus a dedicated Japanese site, turns on more than platform capability and deserves its own treatment; we are only noting here which platform can express which shape.

What You Can Take With You

Exit cost is the question brands skip at selection time and regret at migration time, and the two platforms differ less than you might fear.

BASE supports CSV export through its apps — a CSV product management app for downloading and bulk-editing products, and an order data download app for orders. Shopify has export built into the admin, with product and customer exports available directly and filterable before download. Both give you your catalogue and order history in a portable format, which is the part that matters.

The asymmetry is smaller than the fee difference and worth naming honestly: on BASE the capability is delivered through installable apps rather than being native to the admin, so confirm the specific apps you need are installed and current before you rely on them at migration time. Neither platform, on the evidence we could verify, locks your catalogue in. What neither exports is the thing that actually costs you to rebuild — Japanese product copy and its rights, review history, and customer-support context — which is a contract-and-process problem rather than a platform one, and the same problem we describe in switching a Japan EC agency.

A Decision Rule

In order, because the first question disqualifies before the others are worth asking.

Do you have a Japan-resident person or entity who will genuinely stand behind the shop? If no, BASE is not available to you and the rest of the comparison is moot. If your answer involves borrowing someone's details, treat that as a no.
If yes, are you under roughly ¥110,000–¥140,000 in monthly sales and expecting to stay there a while? Then BASE Standard is genuinely the cheaper instrument, and its native payment coverage is a real advantage. Watch the ¥250 and ¥500 payout charges.
If yes but you are past that band, or growing through it, the fee advantage has already inverted, and the decision comes down to whether you value BASE's bundled local payments over Shopify's operational range.
If you are on Shopify without Japan registration, budget the external transaction fee from day one, plan the gateway before launch rather than after, and re-check the Basic-to-Grow upgrade at around ¥865,000 monthly — not at the threshold that general advice quotes.
If your Japan store must stay in step with a global catalogue, the single-market question outweighs the fee question in both directions.

What LAUNOVA Does — and Where We Are Not Neutral

We should declare the conflict, because this article reaches a conclusion that points toward what we sell. LAUNOVA runs Japanese-language ecommerce operations for overseas brands, including Shopify Japan localization. An article concluding that most foreign brands end up on Shopify rather than BASE is an article that points at our own service line. The check on that is step one of the decision rule above: if you do have a genuine Japan-resident partner and you are a small store, BASE is the cheaper and simpler answer, and we would tell you so. We would rather say that than sell a build you did not need.

What we actually do on this is the Japanese-language layer that neither platform gives you — product copy written for Japanese buyers rather than translated, checkout and payment coverage matched to local expectations, and the customer-facing operation behind it. We scope and price that to what you hand over rather than to a fixed package, so there is no rate card to quote here. If you are earlier and still deciding whether a direct store belongs in the plan at all, our market-entry engagement is the wider starting point.

What we do not do is form your Japanese entity, act as your resident representative or co-operator, or give legal or tax advice on your Specified Commercial Transactions Act disclosure or your consumption tax position — those belong with a Japanese lawyer, judicial scrivener or tax accountant, and we will say so rather than improvise. We are also not reselling either platform and hold no commercial relationship with BASE or Shopify that pays us for this recommendation.

If you are weighing this now, the most useful things to send are whether you hold a Japan entity today, where you need revenue to settle, and your expected monthly order volume and average basket. Get in touch and we will tell you which platforms are actually open to you — including when the answer is the free one.

Rakuten vs Shopify Japan

The same own-store question set against a marketplace, with Shopify's full plan and rate table.

Do You Need a Japan Entity?

What a Japanese company actually unlocks, and which constraints it does not remove.

Shopify Japan Localization Checklist

If you take the Shopify route, the launch items that decide whether it converts.

Sources

• BASE plan fees — Standard: no monthly fee, payment fee 3.6% + ¥40, service fee 3%; Growth: ¥19,980 monthly billing (¥16,580 monthly equivalent on annual billing), payment fee 2.9% as a percentage only — no per-order fixed fee, unlike Standard — service fee 0%. First-party, BASE official pricing page (thebase.com/price), retrieved directly for this article.
• BASE payout costs — ¥250 transfer fee, plus a ¥500 handling fee when the payout is under ¥20,000 and ¥0 at or above it. First-party, BASE help centre. BASE publishes no separate minimum payout threshold, and none is asserted here.
• BASE overseas registration — 「現状、海外の住所にてご登録いただくことはできません」, plus the Japan-resident co-operator exception and the restriction of payouts to a Japanese bank account. First-party, BASE help centre, quoted verbatim and retrieved directly for this article.
• BASE payment methods (かんたん決済) — credit card, konbini/Pay-easy, bank transfer, PAY ID deferred payment, carrier billing, PayPal, Amazon Pay, PayPay. First-party, BASE help centre.
• BASE English / foreign-currency app and CSV product and order export apps. First-party, BASE help centre and app listing pages. Availability of specific apps can change; confirm before relying on them.
• Shopify Japan plan prices and rates — ¥4,850 / ¥13,500 / ¥58,500 monthly billing (¥3,650 / ¥10,100 / ¥44,000 monthly equivalent on annual billing), Shopify Payments online card rates 3.55% / 3.4% / 3.25%, and 外部サービスの取引手数料 of 2% / 1% / 0.6%. First-party, Shopify Japan pricing page (shopify.com/jp/pricing), retrieved directly for this article.
• Shopify Payments Japan eligibility — business registered in Japan with a Japanese business address, individuals must reside in Japan, settlement to a 普通預金 account at a bank in Japan denominated in yen. First-party, Shopify Help Center requirements page for Japan.
• Shopify Payments Japan customer payment methods — konbini, PayPay and carrier billing are not listed among natively supported methods. First-party, Shopify Help Center payment methods page for Japan. Absence from a published list is weaker evidence than an explicit statement; verify current coverage before planning around it.
• KOMOJU overseas merchant path — the KOMOJU help centre publishes an article titled 「海外の事業者がKOMOJUに利用申請する方法」 (how overseas businesses apply to KOMOJU). Our evidence for that article's existence is its title as indexed in search results, not the page itself — the help centre returned HTTP 403 to our fetcher, so we did not read the article body and do not restate its contents. Do not treat any specific document list or eligibility rule as verified by us; confirm directly with KOMOJU.
• Specified Commercial Transactions Act disclosure obligations, including for overseas operators — Consumer Affairs Agency guidance (no-trouble.caa.go.jp). First-party. Referenced here only for the fact that the obligation attaches; we are not a law firm and this is not advice on your specific disclosure.
• All crossover figures (¥110,000–¥140,000, ¥400,000–¥490,000, ¥865,000, ¥5.8 million, ¥645,000) are our own arithmetic from the published fees above, not figures either platform publishes. They assume list pricing, monthly billing unless annual is stated, and exclude taxes, apps, and gateway processing rates — which cancel out of the plan-upgrade comparison because they are identical across plans. Average order value is the main sensitivity in the two range figures, because the ¥40 per-order fee applies on BASE Standard only. Treat them as the shape of the decision, not as a forecast for your store.
• Shopify plan tables, the KOMOJU/gateway requirement for local payment methods, and the Japan-entity question are carried over from our existing published guides rather than re-sourced here; see the linked articles for their underlying sources and caveats.

BASE or Shopify for a Japan-Only Store: The Question That Comes Before Price