Retail and e-commerce automation: listings, labels, reviews

Tools handle orders and stock; checking what pages show is left

According to Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), the consumer e-commerce market reached 27.6 trillion yen in 2025, up 5.5% from the previous year. Online sales accounted for 9.80% of consumer sales of goods. Among goods, food, beverages, and alcohol was the largest category, at 3.33 trillion yen.

Selling on Rakuten Ichiba, Amazon, Yahoo! Shopping, and your own site means handling orders, stock, and product registration in each storefront’s admin screens. Multi-channel management tools take this on. Next Engine imports orders through order APIs, order emails, and CSV data, keeps stock in sync across every store, and publishes and updates product pages in all stores at once. I’LL’s CROSS MALL likewise syncs stock across online stores, registers products in bulk, and manages orders. Amazon and Yahoo! Shopping publish APIs for sellers covering orders, inventory, products, and more.

What remains is checking what each storefront actually shows, copying supplier spec sheets onto product pages, and checking where the testimonials and posts quoted on product pages come from. All of it means reading content and making a judgment.

Work	Screens and systems used	What stays manual
Orders, stock, shipping	Multi-channel tool, marketplace APIs, warehouses and WMS	Mostly automated by multi-channel tools
Registering and updating products	Multi-channel tool, each marketplace’s admin screens	Registration can be done in bulk. Checking how each storefront shows it remains
Checking product page claims	Product pages on Rakuten Ichiba, Amazon, Yahoo! Shopping, and your own site	Comparing prices, comparison prices, country of origin, and “No. 1” claims with the product master and supporting evidence
Food labeling	Supplier spec sheets (paper, PDF, Excel), the online store’s product admin	Copying ingredients and allergens onto product pages and tracking spec sheet revisions
Quoted testimonials and posts	Your site and product pages, the log of commissioned posts	Matching quotes against the log and checking they are clearly marked as ads
New product registration	Head office product master, each trading partner’s entry form	Entering the same product information into each company’s form separately
Competitor prices	Competitors’ product pages	Opening pages and recording prices and promotions

Orders over product page claims reach online stores too

In fiscal 2025, Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency (CAA) issued 13 cease-and-desist orders and 10 surcharge orders (339.4 million yen in total) under the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations, and gave 388 instances of administrative guidance. Its monitoring of online ads alone led to guidance asking for 324 claims to be corrected.

The orders include claims on online stores:

• Tsuruha Group Merchandising showed a “regular price” next to the sale price for 79 products on its own online store. Those products had not actually been sold at that price for a considerable recent period (November 28, 2025)
• Iris Plaza and Daiyu Eight, in their stores on the Qoo10 marketplace, showed the country of origin as “domestic” for 101 and 113 products made outside Japan (November 5, 2025)

In each case, dozens to over a hundred products were covered at once. Even when the right values are in the multi-channel tool, the pages each storefront actually shows need checking separately.

Stealth marketing rules reach whoever publishes commissioned posts

Since October 1, 2023, stealth marketing has been regulated under the same Act. The CAA describes it as hiding the fact that something is an ad. The rules apply to the business that supplies the product or service (the advertiser), not to the influencers it commissions.

In fiscal 2025, the CAA approved four commitment plans and gave seven instances of guidance under the stealth marketing rules. A commitment plan is a correction plan that a business suspected of a violation submits and the CAA approves, a procedure introduced on October 1, 2024. The approved plans included ones over customer stories for frozen meal delivery.

On October 20, 2026, the CAA issued a cease-and-desist order against giobai. The company had asked people to post on Instagram in return for free products and payment, then placed excerpts on its own site as customers’ voices. The CAA found that the company did not make clear that it had requested the posts.

Before quoting testimonials or posts on product pages, you need to check them against your log of commissioned posts and confirm they are clearly marked as ads.

For food, spec sheets and product pages must match

Japan’s Food Labeling Standards govern what appears on packaging and do not apply to what online stores post. Yet online shoppers cannot see the packaging and rely on what the site says. The CAA’s guidebook recommends showing the label items required by the standards on online stores as far as possible.

That information comes from suppliers’ spec sheets. According to the guidebook’s supplement, stores receive it in one of three ways: on paper or as PDFs, in spreadsheet formats, or by data exchange. Paper and PDFs must be read by eye and typed in, and even spreadsheet data sometimes ends up being typed in by hand. The CAA recommends data exchange, which causes fewer human errors. If you can receive data that way, start there.

After publishing, spec sheet revisions must be tracked, and the supplement recommends checking for updates on a set schedule. On April 1, 2026, cashew nuts were added to the allergens that must be labeled. There is a two-year transition period, and the CAA asked prefectures and other local authorities to tell food businesses to recheck their ingredients and manufacturing methods.

Passing product information along is still largely manual. METI describes manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers entering product information into each company’s own forms as a “bucket brigade by hand,” and in November 2024 set up a study group on a shared product master.

What to check before automating

• Whether a multi-channel tool is enough: orders, stock, and product registration and updates can be automated with multi-channel tools and marketplace APIs. Use them where they suffice
• Marketplace and social media terms: check each marketplace’s terms and guidelines on automated checks of product pages and admin screens. The same applies to checking social media posts
• What counts as the correct value: decide whether prices, country of origin, ingredients, and allergens are checked against the product master, spec sheets, or sales records
• Where the evidence for each claim is: gather the sales records behind comparison prices, the surveys behind “No. 1” claims, and the log of commissioned posts, for staff to consult when reviewing findings
• Who decides: staff decide whether a claim is a problem under the Act and how to correct allergen labeling. AI only points out differences and items that need checking
• How each system signs in: check each admin screen’s sign-in steps, such as one-time passwords

What Kitewell does

Descarty’s Kitewell is integration and automation middleware that connects systems through APIs, files, databases, and screens.

• Reads every storefront’s pages: AI reads the screen and extracts what product pages and admin screens on each marketplace and your own site show. Operations that worked are remembered and repeated the same way on later runs
• Keeps running when screens change: when a remembered operation no longer fits a marketplace’s screen, AI reads the screen again, does the step, and remembers the new operation. If that fails, the run stops, and AI looks into the cause and suggests the fix. Fix it in the editor, then save and continue
• Reads spec sheets and compares them: questions to AI and judgments are workflow steps. AI reads ingredients and allergens from spec sheets in PDF or image form and shows where they differ from the product page. The AI model is chosen per step
• Starts from spec sheets that arrive by email: Gmail, Microsoft 365, and IMAP mailboxes are checked at set intervals, and attachments are saved
• Runs from an Excel list: register a product list as a batch sheet, and it runs row by row and writes each result back to its row. Runs can also start on a schedule, such as Mondays at 8:00
• People check where it matters: approval can be set on any step, such as before a page is corrected. Requests reach Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email, and sending one back restarts the run from the chosen step
• Handles sign-in hurdles: saved browser sign-ins are reused by later runs. When a one-time password is required, the run pauses until staff enter it. Passwords are referenced by name and typed in without showing the value to the AI
• Every check on record: each run keeps its logs, screenshots of the pages it checked, and approval decisions

You can start from one piece of work, such as listing products through checking how their pages display on each marketplace and fixing them. A demo shows how it runs, a free connection test confirms Kitewell reaches your systems, and a one-month PoC measures the result against success criteria agreed up front, before you license it for production. See From evaluation to production for details.

Sources

• METI: Results of the fiscal 2025 e-commerce market survey (October 21, 2026; in Japanese)
• NE Inc.: Order management and Product registration (in Japanese)
• I’LL Inc.: CROSS MALL feature list (in Japanese)
• Amazon: What is the Selling Partner API?
• LY Corporation: Shopping APIs, Yahoo! Developer Network (in Japanese)
• CAA: Enforcement of the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations in fiscal 2025 (May 28, 2026; in Japanese)
• CAA: Stealth marketing violates the Act from October 1, 2023 (in Japanese)
• CAA: Cease-and-desist order against giobai (October 20, 2026; in Japanese)
• CAA: Guidebook on food labeling information for online sales and its supplement on obtaining and managing labeling information (June 2022; in Japanese)
• CAA: Labeling of foods containing allergens (April 1, 2026; in Japanese)
• METI: A shared product master to streamline the supply chain (March 14, 2025; in Japanese)