Recently moved to Tokyo on a student visa. When I lived in the US I ran a small Shopify business selling painted skate decks. I have the business registered as an LLC in the states. Now that I’ve moved to Japan, a few Japanese skaters want to buy my products but I don’t know how to sell to them. Shopify support hasn’t been able to help in setting up the web shop for a new market so I’m turning to Reddit for guidance.
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If you’re planning on doing it small scale, there are sites like Rakuten where you can set up shop, but you can’t do a full scale business on a student visa (I mean, you can, but there are a lot of restrictions).
[TheBase](https://thebase.in/) is the short of Shopify equivalent for Japan. My artist friends use it to run their shops and they sell in both Japan and overseas, so in terms of getting set up here and having all the right paperwork, that’s a good start.
Not a lawyer/accountant & DYOR, but you’d be better off registering separately as a sole trader in Japan for your Japan sales, and have another shop for them there, and leave your LLC separate for non-Japanese sales. Otherwise you’re in for a world of pain navigating the tax complications etc.
But Shopify operates in Japan and is doing quite well
You can easily set it up to sell to Japan in the markets settings, if you need help DM me I’ve been running Shopify stores for years.
My understanding of that student visa is that as long as you’re not working more than 28 hours per week it’s fine.
https://study.gaijinpot.com/guide/working-as-a-student-japan/