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The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2025

Iris Plaza's Qoo10 store called 101 foreign-made goods 'domestic'

Chinese-made pet carriers and daily goods sold as 'domestic' on the Qoo10 marketplace. The CAA and JFTC ordered two Iris-group retailers to publicly correct it.

Iris Plaza · Daiyu Eight · 2025-11-05

What happened

Iris Plaza, the e-commerce arm of the Iris Ohyama household-goods group, ran an official store on the Qoo10 marketplace. On 101 products — disaster-prevention goods, appliances, pet carriers and more — the origin field said 'domestic', presenting foreign-made goods as made in Japan. Its affiliate retailer Daiyu Eight did the same on its own Qoo10 store with 113 products: pet and hygiene goods marked 'domestic' but produced abroad.

The Consumer Affairs Agency and the JFTC's Tohoku office investigated together. The displays ran through 2025 — one pet carrier was listed as 'domestic' from 27 February to 25 May 2025, though it was made in China. On 5 November 2025 both companies received measure orders under the Act's provisions on misleading origin displays: consumers could not tell the goods were foreign-made, and the origin claim was likely to mislead.

Each company was ordered to inform consumers thoroughly that the displays violated the Act, to adopt recurrence-prevention measures and to stop similar displays. Origin fields on a marketplace look like metadata, but the law reads them as claims — and 214 products across two stores carried the same wrong one.

Why it happened

  • 214 products were marked 'domestic' in the origin field while actually produced abroad — mostly in China.
  • Marketplace product pages are advertising: the origin display counts as a claim about the product.
  • The joint CAA/JFTC investigation treated the pattern across two related stores as separate but parallel violations.
What it costmeasure orders, public correctionembarrassing

The lesson

An origin field is a claim: Iris Plaza's Qoo10 store listed 101 foreign-made goods as 'domestic', and Japan's regulators ordered public correction across 214 products.

Aftermath

The measure orders of 5 November 2025 required Iris Plaza and Daiyu Eight to publicly notify consumers, adopt recurrence-prevention measures and refrain from similar origin displays. The investigation was run jointly by the CAA and the JFTC's Tohoku regional office.

Sources

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