"Candy Japan" delivering Japanese sweets to the world is releasing a sales report for 2015

ByCandy Japan

We are deploying services that periodically send sweets normally sold in Japan to overseas customersCandy JapanHas published a revenue and expenditure report for 2015. Candy Japan has steadily increased its sales over the past few years, but it seems that 2015 was a year of encountering unexpected happening.

Candy Japan 2015 Year in Review
http://www.candyjapan.com/2015-year-in-review

Candy Japan is a member-based service that Bemmu Sepponen from Finland originally started in 2011 and is a service that delivers twice a month to overseas customers with assortment of sweets sold in Japan. It seems that sweets that never say when living in Japan seem attractive to overseas people, and it is said that at present there are nearly 1000 registered customers as customers.

Candy Japan - Japanese Candy Box


Here is the graph of income and expenditure published by such Candy Japan. Overall it was a situation that it could be said to rise sharply, but the place where you are concerned about the biggest up and down movement in the latter half of 2015.


The graph of 2015 symbolizing the change in feelings emoticons speak. It is a graph showing the peak around the third quarter of 2015, but it shows a dramatic decline immediately after that. In particular, the drop in credit cards shown in red is prominent, and orange gift cards also show a decreasing trend to match it. On the other hand, it is interesting that sales by green PayPal show a move that can be said to be steady.


Sepponen explains about its contents as follows.

◆ illegal use of cards
Sepponen, who set the target of "increasing the number of members to 1,500 members" as a goal in 2015, said he felt that he continued to grow steadily halfway. At one time, the number of registrants was over 1,200 people, but something says one of them noticed that it was "a mirage".

It was the number of members that seemed to have been growing steadily, but the fact is thatIt was a registration involving a criminal credit cardAnd that. In order to confirm whether the stolen credit card can be used, many cases occurred using Candy Japan's site.

The case is as follows. It seems that when checking card information illegally acquired in some way later, by using the card at Candy Japan it was confirmed whether the card can actually be used. Details of a series of events are explained in detail on the following page.

Candy Japan hit with credit card fraud


In response to this incident, Sepponen decided to stop payment with credit card and make a decision to return only to payment by paypal. In addition, due to that influence sales of gift cards that were settled with credit cards also disappeared, and it seems that the influence is clearly shown in the graph.

In addition, it stopped accepting credit cards, and it was said that he really lost a serious user who was considering using the service. In addition, the result of the A / B test which was carried out to improve the site also seems to have become useless because the result became irritated by the illegal card settlement.

Thanks to this one thing, it is said that users who had exceeded 1000 people temporarily fell to the level of 750 people, and it is said that it can not be said that we have yet to take a recovery trend.

Tax problem
The other problem is that it was a change related to newly found taxes. Sepponen who has lived in Japan for a long time already said he decided to pay taxes to Japan instead of his home country Finland for a year. It was the amount of tax that I initially thought was going to be cheap, but in fact it seems that as a result we have paid more tax than before as a result of the complicated tax system. However, on the other hand, I heard that I was able to receive the refund of tax that I had in Finland so far, it seems that the money has returned as it is.

◆ Actually, I also published books
Although it was a year that was hit by such an incident, Sepponen wrote his book "How to Start and Grow Your Subscription BoxFrom 0 to 1000 Subscribers ".

How to Start and Grow Your Subscription Box


Originally it was a book intended to be completed in about a month, but in fact it took four months to write. While writing, I think that writing work that was hard enough to say that "It was hopeless and I felt like never ended like this" was far more research and confirmation than originally expected.

Please note that this book also details the credit card issue that can be said to be the biggest event in 2015. It is interesting to see what Candy Japan, which has been doing business while clearing various problems, will move in 2016.