Market Overview

The domestic retailing market size in 2022 slightly increased from the previous year. Added with relaxed domestic behavior restrictions that had been imposed during the pandemic, the year saw abolished cap for the number of inbound visitors in October and resumed acceptance of personal tourists, which resulted in reviving the once-disappeared inbound demand amid the pandemic, causing department stores to upturn their profits. When compared to 2021 when people hesitated from buying, 2022 witnessed favorable sales in luxury brands and expensive products including jewelry and watches. Pandemic-triggered lifestyle changes and more frequent outing opportunities boosted the replacement demand for bags and apparel items. Sales growth at shopping centers was relatively high due to busier turnout.
On the other hand, the year experienced rising prices of food and other merchandises caused by soaring prices for raw materials as well as fuels. As a result, more people started cutting down on their spending, which raised presence of those retailers such as second-hand goods dealers, unified price shops, discount stores, etc.

Noteworthy Topics

The 2024 Logistics Issue in Distribution and Retailing Market

Because of the 2024 logistics issue, the distribution and retailing market faces concerns over burgeoning problems in the sales of ecommerce channel.

Online and catalog retailing has been established as commercial practice among consumers, and the number of parcels dealt by domestic home delivery businesses has increased rapidly. Ecommerce has quickly become a common use by extensive age ranges of people, as a measure against store closure, shortened store business hours and discouraged outing and transportation for unnecessary or non-urgent matters during the pandemic.
Driver shortage may heavily affect those businesses dealing in large merchandises such as furniture and home appliances with workloads of delivery and installation.
The retailing industry has, in fact, concerns over product delivery. Because product delivery converges during the store opening hours or bargaining days in which the workload is heavy. In addition, those retailers dealing in fresh food and farm products need many times of delivery per day and have a risk of not being able to display merchandises at the store if such deliveries are left undone by the shortage of drivers.

Future Outlook

While stay-at-home spending has ended by 2023 as it entered pro-pandemic era, spending less is continuing due to soaring commodity prices. Meanwhile, weakened yen has brought in strong inbound demand to bring about favorable sales at department stores, drugstores and outlet stores. Therefore, increase from the previous year is expected for 2023 domestic retailing market size.

Research Outline