On the Establishment of the Japan E-Commerce Society
According to the "Market Survey on Electronic Commerce" published by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in June 2016, the size of Japan's EC market in 2015 was 13,774.6 billion yen (up 7.6% from the previous year). The market size, which was only about 65 billion yen in 1998, has expanded rapidly by more than 20 times in just 17 years. Furthermore, in November 2016, Nomura Research Institute predicted that the domestic EC market would expand to 26 trillion yen in 2022. This means that the market size will roughly double in just the next five years, making it a truly explosively growing market.
The EC market, which began almost simultaneously with the emergence of the Internet in the late 1990s, has grown alongside the spread of the Internet and developed alongside various technological innovations. These technologies include communications infrastructure technologies such as broadband and wireless, logistics infrastructure technologies, search engine technologies, the spread and evolution of CGM (consumer-generated media) such as blogs, SNS, and video sharing sites, the spread and evolution of mobile information terminals such as smartphones and tablets, and marketing technologies that integrate these technologies.
Furthermore, the speed of technological innovation has accelerated in recent years, and new technologies that can dramatically change the EC market environment are expected to become widespread. These technologies include big data utilization, AI (artificial intelligence), VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), voice recognition devices, etc. As such, the EC market environment is becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex.
However, as mentioned above, in this rapidly growing and increasingly sophisticated EC market, research into related technologies is scattered across a wide range of fields, so past results and knowledge are not productively accumulated, and most market participants are instead at the mercy of new technologies and changes in the market environment that appear one after another. In this chaotic market environment, fraudulent services that claim to be scientific or academic are rampant.
Based on the above concerns, we are establishing the Japan E-Commerce Society in order to share academic knowledge related to e-commerce and contribute to the healthy development of e-commerce.
The EC market is faced with a wide range of issues and problems. We aim to build an academic society that can serve as a forum for researchers to exchange ideas and share accumulated knowledge not only among researchers, but also between researchers and EC-related companies, and among EC-related companies themselves, regarding basic and applied research in IT (information technology), logistics, marketing, HRM (human resource management), and general management, and to contribute to the healthy growth of Japan's EC market in the future.
September 2017 All members of the Japan Society of E-Commerce