Japanese Wholesale Terms Explained: How to Read a Japanese Price List

Quick answer: A Japanese wholesale price list carries two prices and at least three separate quantities, and mixing them up is what breaks a first order. 上代 (jōdai) is the suggested retail price and 下代 (gedai) is what you pay, with 掛率 (kakeritsu) expressing the second as a percentage of the first. 入数 (irisu) is how many pieces sit inside one packed unit, while ロット (lot), 最低注文数量 (MOQ) and 発注単位 (order unit) set the smallest quantity the supplier accepts and the increments above it. Add the tax label (税抜 or 税込) and the lead time (納期) and you have read the whole sheet. This guide maps every column and walks one illustrative order through the arithmetic.

Key takeaways

• A Japanese sheet answers three questions in three column groups: what the item is worth at retail, what share of that you pay, and in what bundles it moves. Translate by group, not word by word.
• 上代 (jōdai) is retail, 下代 (gedai) is wholesale, and 掛率 (kakeritsu) is the ratio between them. Getting these two columns backwards inverts your margin.
• 入数 (irisu) describes what one unit contains. MOQ and 発注単位 describe how many units you must buy. They are different constraints and both apply at once.
• Price lists are commonly quoted 税抜 (tax-exclusive). Japan's standard consumption tax rate is 10%, with a reduced 8% rate on food and qualifying newspapers.
• 納期 (nōki) is readiness at the supplier's end. International transit, customs clearance and duties sit on top of it and on top of the price, which is where a Japanese quote stops describing your real cost.

Why a Japanese price sheet has two prices and three different quantities

A spreadsheet arrives. Maybe from a booth at a trade show, maybe from a sales rep at a distributor, maybe as a PDF attached to a two-line email. The columns are narrow, the header row is in kanji, and machine translation turns half of them into phrases like "number of entering" that tell you nothing.

Before translating anything, it helps to know that a Japanese sheet is organized around a different question than a US line sheet. A US sheet mostly answers "what does one unit cost, and what is the case pack?" A Japanese sheet answers "what is this worth at retail, what share of that do you pay, and in what bundles does it move?" Those are three separate ideas, and each one has its own vocabulary and its own column.

That structure is why the price columns come in pairs, and why quantity appears three or four times on a single row without being redundant. If you have already read our guide to the five ways US buyers source Japanese products wholesale, this is the document that lands in your inbox at the end of every one of those routes. It also lands in your hands at the Tokyo International Gift Show, usually as a stapled A4 sheet handed across a table.

Here is the whole thing in one map. Find the kanji you are looking at, then read across.

The price columns: jōdai, gedai, and kakeritsu

Japanese trade uses a plain pair of words for the two ends of the price. Jōdai (上代) is the price set for the end consumer, commonly called the retail price. Gedai (下代) is the price the supplier sets for the retailer buying the goods, the same thing as the wholesale or acquisition price. (DEXTRE, Japanese-language source)

Kakeritsu (掛率) is the share the wholesale price represents of the retail price. A 60% kakeritsu on a ¥1,200 jōdai means you pay ¥720 and keep ¥480 if you sell at the suggested retail price. The same source notes a point worth holding onto: the same product can carry different kakeritsu for different customers depending on relationship, season and demand, so a single percentage is never a fixed market rate.

That is the short version. The mechanics of why Japanese pricing runs downward from the retail tag instead of upward from cost, how distribution layers stack their own percentages, and how to negotiate inside that system get a full treatment in our guide to kakeritsu and Japanese wholesale pricing. If the price columns are what you are stuck on, read that one next.

Two adjacent terms worth catching on the same sheet. 希望小売価格 (kibō kōri kakaku) is the suggested retail price stated by the maker, and it is a reference rather than a rule you are bound to. オープン価格 (ōpun kakaku, open price) means the maker publishes no suggested retail at all, in which case there is no jōdai column to take a percentage of, and you will see plain wholesale figures instead.

The quantity columns: irisu, case pack, lot, MOQ, and order unit

This is where first orders actually go wrong. Four different numbers on one row all look like "quantity," and they constrain you in four different ways.

入数 (irisu) is how many pieces sit inside one packed unit. Six pens in an inner pack, twelve sachets in a display box. Japanese wholesale glossaries treat it as the pieces-per-package figure. When a supplier says the price is ¥720, the next question is always "per what," and irisu is the answer.

ケース入数 (kēsu irisu) or カートン (kāton) is the same idea one level up: pieces per shipping case. This is the number your freight forwarder works from, because cases are what get measured and weighed.

ロット (rotto) is a batch of identical product handled as one group through manufacturing, sales, transport and storage. Japanese logistics glossaries split it further into 製造ロット (manufacturing lot) and 最小ロット (minimum lot), the smallest quantity a supplier will produce or ship, and 発注ロット (order lot), the minimum quantity agreed between two companies for a transaction. (Aussie Foods logistics dictionary, Japanese-language source)

最低注文数量 (MOQ) and 発注単位 (hatchū tan'i) are the pair that trips people up, because they sound identical in translation and are not. A Japanese B2B explainer draws the line cleanly: the order unit is the increment, the step size you are allowed to order in, while MOQ is the floor on total quantity for the transaction. Both conditions usually have to be satisfied at the same time. The same page notes that SPQ, the standard packing quantity, often becomes the order unit in practice, which is exactly how irisu ends up governing your order size. (Money Forward, Japanese-language source)

Here is one order walked all the way through. The numbers are invented to show the arithmetic. They are not a market rate and not a real product price.

Read the bottom half of that table again, because it contains the lesson. The per-piece price looks small. The smallest order the sheet allows is fixed by two constraints multiplying together, and the shipping threshold sits above the resulting order value, so a domestic shipping charge applies on top. None of that is visible in the ¥720.

Categories differ a lot here. Small, light goods tend to carry gentler minimums than bulky ones, which is one reason a first Japanese order in a category like stationery is easier to size realistically than a first order in heavy homeware.

Tax, shipping, and lead time: the lines that change your landed cost

税抜 (zeinuki) and 税込 (zeikomi). Zeinuki means the price excludes consumption tax; zeikomi means it is already inside. Japanese B2B sheets are commonly quoted zeinuki, and the difference is not decorative. Japan's National Tax Agency states a standard consumption tax rate of 10% (7.8% national plus 2.2% local) and a reduced rate of 8% (6.24% plus 1.76%) that applies to food and beverages as defined by the Food Labeling Act, excluding alcohol and restaurant dining, and to newspapers published at least twice a week under a subscription contract. (National Tax Agency, Japanese-language source) A mixed sheet with snacks and homeware on it can therefore carry both rates. Consumption tax is a domestic tax, so how it is treated on a sale that leaves Japan depends on the structure of the transaction. Ask rather than assume.

送料 (sōryō). The shipping line on a Japanese price list is domestic Japanese shipping, and the 送料無料条件 figure is the order value above which the supplier stops charging it. Neither number describes what it costs to move goods from Japan to the United States. That is a separate quote in a separate currency with separate weight brackets.

納期 (nōki). Lead time is the supplier's readiness date. It answers "when can we hand this over," not "when will it reach your warehouse." International transit, customs clearance and duty payment all sit after nōki on the calendar, and they are the part of the timeline a Japanese sheet never shows.

Those three lines are the seam where a Japanese quote stops describing your real cost. A gedai price plus a domestic shipping line is not a landed cost, and treating it as one is the most common planning error in a first Japanese order. Our guide to importing Japanese products: customs, duties and logistics walks through building the model properly, from HTS classification to freight mode.

What can still change: haiban, pre-orders, JAN codes, and trade terms

廃番 (haiban) means discontinued. You will meet it in two places: as a note on a sheet, and as a reply to a reorder six months after you built a shelf around the item. When you see it, the useful next question is not "why," it is "what is the successor item number." Japanese makers frequently supersede a hinban rather than dropping the product line.

予約 (yoyaku) and 受注生産 (juchū seisan) mean pre-order and made to order. Both convert your order into a commitment before goods exist. For an overseas buyer that matters more than it does domestically, because the production window and the international transit window stack on top of each other. Get the expected handover date in writing, in the quote, not in conversation.

JANコード. JAN is the Japanese name for what GS1 calls a GTIN, the international standard product identification number, and the standard 13-digit form is a GTIN-13. GS1 Japan issues company prefixes beginning with 45 or 49, the two digits that represent Japan, and the 13-digit code is built from that company prefix, an item code, and a check digit. (GS1 Japan, Japanese-language source) In practice, the barcode already on the Japanese package is a globally valid GTIN-13, the same numbering older US documentation calls EAN-13. You can usually load it straight into your POS or marketplace listing. Confirm the specific requirements of whichever channel you sell through, since some marketplaces have their own rules about which identifier types they accept.

取引条件 (torihiki jōken) is the trade terms block, and it is the section buyers skim. Payment timing, returns handling, delivery conditions and cancellation rules live there. If you are still deciding whether to work with a supplier at all, read it against the checklist in our guide to vetting Japanese suppliers before you sign anything.

Where orosy fits

orosy is a Japanese B2B wholesale marketplace. Every field above still exists on it. You just read them on a product page instead of decoding them from a kanji spreadsheet.

Each product carries its selling unit and order unit on the page, so the irisu question is answered before you ask it. Where a supplier sets a minimum order amount for the items it ships together, that minimum is shown while you are ordering, not only in the terms. You search across 200,000+ products in one catalog and one cart. Those products come from orosy's Japanese marketplace, where 5,000+ brands and suppliers are joining this API over time. orosy handles the negotiation and account opening with each supplier, so you are not maintaining a separate relationship and a separate price sheet for every one of them. If part of your order cannot be filled, you are billed only for what is actually shipped.

Wholesale prices are shown after your account is approved, for the same reason a Japanese supplier does not email a gedai column to an unknown address. Before approval you can search the catalog and try the ordering flow in test mode, so you can see how the fields are laid out without placing a live order.

orosy arranges international shipping to your country. You do not need a forwarder or a receiving point in Japan. Before you order, the cart shows a reference figure for international shipping, for your information only. The actual shipping cost is calculated later and billed to you, and it can differ from that figure. Customs clearance in your country, import duties, and taxes at import are your responsibility. They are not part of the cost billed by orosy.

If you want to see the fields described in this article laid out as a working catalog, create an account. Registration costs nothing and does not require a card. Most accounts are approved within an hour if the sign-up email domain matches the business website or the email is listed on it; otherwise, approval normally comes within 12 hours.

FAQ

What do jōdai and gedai mean on a Japanese price list?

Jōdai (上代) is the suggested retail price, the number the product is expected to carry on a shelf. Gedai (下代) is the wholesale price, the number you actually pay. Japanese sheets often print both side by side, and the ratio between them is the kakeritsu (掛率). If you read gedai as a retail price, or jōdai as your cost, your entire margin calculation inverts, so check which column is which before you do any math.

What does irisu (入数) mean, and how is it different from a lot or an MOQ?

Irisu is how many pieces sit inside one packed unit, for example 6 pens in one inner pack. A lot (ロット) is a batch the supplier produces or ships as a group. MOQ (最低注文数量) is the smallest total quantity the supplier will accept in one order. Order unit (発注単位) is the increment you must order in above that floor. Irisu tells you what one unit contains; MOQ and order unit tell you how many of those units you have to buy.

Is a Japanese wholesale price tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive?

Read the label. 税抜 (zeinuki) means the figure excludes Japan's consumption tax and 税込 (zeikomi) means the tax is already inside it. B2B price lists are commonly quoted 税抜. Japan's standard consumption tax rate is 10%, with a reduced 8% rate for food and drink (excluding alcohol and restaurant dining) and for subscription newspapers published at least twice a week, so the same sheet can carry two different tax treatments. Consumption tax is a domestic tax, so ask your supplier or platform how it is treated on a sale that leaves Japan.

What is a JAN code and can I use it in the United States?

A JAN code is the Japanese name for a GTIN-13, the 13-digit product identification number that GS1 administers worldwide and that older documents call EAN-13. GS1 Japan issues company prefixes beginning with 45 or 49, which is why Japanese barcodes usually start with those two digits. It is a global standard number, so it works in US retail and marketplace systems the same way any other GTIN-13 does.

What does 納期 (nōki) mean when a Japanese supplier quotes it?

Nōki is the lead time, the date or interval by which the supplier expects to hand over the goods. On a price list it is often written as a range in days or as a note like 受注生産 (made to order). It describes readiness at the supplier's end, not arrival at your door, so treat international transit and customs clearance as time that sits on top of the quoted nōki.

How do I find suppliers in Japan if I cannot read the price list at all?

Three routes work without Japanese reading ability. Trade shows put an interpreter and a printed sheet in front of you at the same time. Japanese wholesale distributors that already export will quote in English. Japanese wholesale websites and B2B marketplaces present the same fields in a structured form, so you read a product page instead of decoding a spreadsheet column by column. Check whether the site offers an English interface before you rely on this route. Whichever route you take, the underlying terms in this glossary are the ones being translated, so knowing them helps you check the translation.

Sources

• DEXTRE — 上代 (jōdai), 下代 (gedai) and 掛率 (kakeritsu) definitions, and variation in wholesale prices by customer (Japanese-language source): https://dextre.app/ja/wholesale/24225/
• Money Forward — 発注単位, MOQ (最低発注数量) and SPQ (標準梱包単位) and how they differ (Japanese-language source): https://biz.moneyforward.com/invoice/basic/62475/
• Aussie Foods logistics dictionary — definition of ロット, 最小ロット and 発注ロット (Japanese-language source): https://www.aussie-fan.co.jp/food-logistics/dictionary/1091
• National Tax Agency of Japan — consumption tax standard rate 10% and reduced rate 8% (Japanese-language source): https://www.nta.go.jp/taxes/shiraberu/taxanswer/shohi/6303.htm
• GS1 Japan — GTIN / JAN code, the 45 and 49 company prefixes, and GTIN-13 structure (Japanese-language source): https://www.gs1jp.org/code/jan/about_jan.html