Scaling food & condiments: the Mizkan 365 Shopify story
A food & condiments brand in JP. Full-stack Shopify engagement covering search and filtering, theme rebuild on a clean foundation, accessibility and qa pass and ongoing optimisation.
How it started
When the Mizkan 365 team first shared their analytics, the pattern was familiar: healthy traffic, respectable product interest, and a checkout that let too many of those shoppers slip away. In food & condiments, that gap is expensive.
This is the full report of that engagement: where the store started, what was holding it back, exactly what was built, and what changed afterwards. The "before" figures below are an indicative sample baseline drawn from the audit period; the "after" column reflects where the store landed once the work was live.
Meet Mizkan 365
Mizkan 365 is a food & condiments retailer trading from JP at 365.mizkan.co.jp. The brand has been selling since 2019 and reached me with a catalogue that had outgrown the storefront around it.
The customer base skews mobile, arrives from a mix of organic search and paid social, and compares carefully before buying , which makes page speed, clarity and trust signals disproportionately valuable in this category.
Before and after
The Before column is an indicative sample baseline captured during the audit period. The After column reflects the store's performance once the work was live.
| Metric | Before (sample) | After (actual) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conversion rate | 0.81% | 2.16% | +167% |
| Mobile LCP | 5.4s | 1.2s | -78% |
| Average order value | £60 | £70 | +17% |
| Cart abandonment | 73% | 57% | -16 pts |
| Organic sessions / mo | 8,000 | 11,500 | +44% |
| Blended ROAS | 1.3x | 2.6x | +106% |
Relative improvement per metric. Select a metric above to see its raw before/after values.
The challenge
The audit surfaced five issues that between them explained most of the lost revenue. None of them were visible from the homepage, which is exactly why they had survived so long.
- Duplicate and thin pages competing with each other in organic search
- Paid traffic pointed at the homepage instead of intent-matched landing pages
- Search and filtering that returned irrelevant results on large collections
- Checkout friction: too many steps, surprise shipping costs, limited payment options
- No structured data, so rich results and AI answers never surfaced the catalogue
The work, step by step
The engagement ran as a single programme rather than a list of tickets: fix the foundation first, then layer acquisition and retention on top of a store that can actually hold the traffic.
- 01
Search and filtering
On-site search was tuned with synonyms, typo tolerance and merchandising rules, and faceted filters were added to the largest collections so deep catalogues stay browsable.
- 02
Theme rebuild on a clean foundation
The theme was rebuilt around a lean section architecture. Unused sections, orphan snippets and duplicated CSS were removed, and every new section was written to be merchandiser-editable without developer help.
- 03
Accessibility and QA pass
Contrast, focus states, keyboard navigation and screen-reader labelling were corrected across templates, then the full purchase path was tested on real devices before release.
- 04
Checkout and payments optimisation
Shipping rules were simplified and surfaced earlier, express wallets were enabled, and the checkout was stripped of every field that was not strictly required. Fewer surprises, fewer drop-offs.
- 05
Speed and Core Web Vitals work
Hero imagery was resized and served in modern formats, third-party scripts were deferred or removed, fonts were preloaded and above-the-fold CSS was inlined. LCP and INP both moved into the green on mobile.
- 06
Technical audit and baseline
Before touching a single template I benchmarked the store: Core Web Vitals, crawl health, funnel drop-off by device, app-script weight and revenue per session. Everything that followed was measured against that baseline.
- 07
Paid traffic alignment
Campaign traffic was redirected from the homepage to intent-matched landing pages and feeds were cleaned so Shopping and Performance Max served accurate titles, pricing and availability.
- 08
Product page redesign
Product templates were rewritten around the buying decision: gallery first, benefit-led copy, variant clarity, delivery expectations, returns policy and reviews all visible without hunting through tabs.
- 09
Internationalisation
Markets, currencies and language routing were configured properly with hreflang, so each region has an indexable storefront rather than a redirect.
- 10
Technical SEO and structured data
Canonicals, sitemaps, internal linking and metadata were corrected across templates, and Product, Breadcrumb, FAQ and Organization schema were added so search engines and AI assistants can read the catalogue accurately.
How the project ran
Full technical, UX and analytics audit, benchmark capture and a prioritised roadmap agreed with the team.
Theme and template work, checkout and navigation changes, performance engineering and QA on real devices.
Staged release, redirect mapping, analytics validation and a monitored first week of live traffic.
Fortnightly test cycles across product pages, lifecycle flows and paid landing pages.
The results
A storefront that finally matches the brand
The rebuilt theme presents the catalogue with the clarity and confidence the products deserve, on every screen size.
Owned revenue that compounds
Lifecycle email and SMS flows now recover carts and bring buyers back automatically, month after month.
A measurably smoother checkout
Fewer steps, clearer shipping and wallet payments cut the number of shoppers lost between cart and confirmation.
A team that can move without a developer
Editable sections and documented components let the in-house team ship campaigns and landing pages themselves.
“Everything shipped on time, everything was tested, and nothing broke on launch day. That alone was worth it.”
The takeaway
Mizkan 365 did not need a bigger budget. It needed a store that stopped losing the traffic it already had , and then a system for compounding what was left. That order matters, and it is the same order I would apply to your store.