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Providing customers with a new experience in eyewear
JINS designs, manufactures, and sells eyeglasses and other eyewear products. As a global chain, JINS aims to enrich people’s lives through eyewear under the brand’s philosophy: “Magnify Life.” Opening its first store in 2001, JINS gained popularity as the leading “same-day service for a low price” store in the Japanese eyewear market.
JINS has focused on providing new products and services since its founding, and to this day it continues to actively develop products and services that are the first of their kind not only in Japan, but also globally. In addition to eyewear products such as Airframe, which launched the lightweight eyewear market, and the blue light–blocking JINS SCREEN, JINS is continuously bringing new eyewear services to the market. “MEGANE on MEGANE” uses deep learning to allow shoppers to virtually try on new glasses without removing the ones they’re wearing, while other shoppers enjoy the contact lens vending machine called “TOUCH & COLLECT.”
“We aim to create new products quickly, maintaining the spirit of a venture-backed start-up,” says Takuma Sato, Senior Director of the IT Governance Department, Global Governance HQ at JINS Holdings, Inc. “In recent years, we have launched in-store services that utilize the latest digital technology and are ramping up our digital commerce initiatives centered on an online store and JINS app to organically fuse our online and brick-and-mortar stores.”
At the JINS online store, customers can easily order corrective eyeglasses for delivery if JINS has access to the customer’s lens strength data from a prescription, in-store purchase records, or another source. The JINS website also provides services that are revolutionizing the way shoppers choose eyeglasses. For example, the company offers a made-to-order glasses design service, JINS PAINT, and proprietary AI service, JINS BRAIN, which employs machine learning using the abundant experience of in-store staff to determine if an eyeglasses design looks good on the wearer. Because eyeglasses are essential to daily life, JINS notices a big spike in website traffic whenever people stay indoors due to a natural disaster or pandemic. According to Sato, JINS has always wanted to use the JINS online store and JINS app to provide a better shopping experience.
Delivering an enhanced web experience to shoppers
Like many retailers, JINS used standard tools to analyze user traffic to the JINS online store. However, although these tools could be used to monitor site hits and sources of traffic, they provided little additional data or actionable insights.
“It’s generally believed that improving website performance leads to better conversion rates for purchases. However, there was no way to look up correlations between the two using our existing analysis tools. Conventional tools do not tell you in quantitative terms how changing your web UI or tuning performance will affect the conversion rate or improve sales,” says Sato. “Although it’s not impossible to calculate such correlations by hand, it is a lot of work. Content and services are updated every day. It’s unrealistic to calculate everything by hand on a continual basis. Still, we really wanted data that would help us decide whether we took the right steps to enhance the user experience and what additional aspects we needed to improve.”
Confronted with these issues, JINS turned to Akamai mPulse, a real user monitoring solution that visualizes the performance experienced by the end user to reveal what should be corrected and the effectiveness of improvement measures.
JINS was already using Akamai CDN and other services, and experienced their effectiveness in improving performance. To determine whether further enhancements could be made, JINS conducted an mPulse proof of concept and was able to specifically visualize performance bottlenecks in the current implementation. JINS then analyzed traffic to determine what affect each measure and configuration change would have on conversion rates.
In developing our business, we aim to seamlessly integrate the physical and the digital.
Takuma Sato, Senior Director of the IT Governance Department, Global Governance HQ, JINS Holdings, Inc.
Visualizing business impact through simulation
mPulse helps JINS optimize the performance of the JINS online store. For example, when changing the JavaScript of a specific page, mPulse is used to analyze what effect this change will have on the user experience. mPulse is also used to simulate what effect performance changes will have on purchase rates, conversion rates, or other business indicators used to inform decision-making.
mPulse also uncovered previously undetected issues. For instance, it discovered that some third-party JavaScript caused delays in rendering the page by web browsers. Improvement measures implemented based on this information reduced render times to just 4 seconds, down from as long as 10 seconds. These improvements helped to significantly boost real conversion rates.
In addition to JavaScript, there were always several elements, such as fonts and CSS, that could theoretically contribute to site performance or conversion rates, but they were often difficult to address without quantitative data. With mPulse, it’s possible to see in numerical terms the actual change in time required by users to load a page, which made it easy for those responsible for implementing web content and services to see the effects of their work. This eliminated the need for the laborious manual processes of gathering necessary data and conducting analysis, significantly lessening the load on the IT department.
Creating a seamless customer experience
Akamai provides regular reviews based on mPulse data as a standard service. JINS hopes to use this report service to identify long-term issues and create improvement measures. In the future, the plan is to apply mPulse to overseas e-commerce sites to conduct integrated performance management.
“In developing our business, we aim to seamlessly integrate the physical and the digital,” says Sato. “In that sense, digital services are increasing in importance. The JINS app has seen a surge of user growth and is viewed as a core service. I’ve heard that a native mobile app SDK for mPulse is also in development, so we hope to use that together with the web browserbased online store to provide an even better customer experience.”
In recent years, we have launched in-store services that utilize the latest digital technology and are ramping up our digital commerce initiatives, centered on an online store and JINS app to organically fuse our online and brick-and-mortar stores.
Takuma Sato, Senior Director of the IT Governance Department, Global Governance HQ, JINS Holdings, Inc.
Based on bot traffic trends observed through mPulse, Sato is also interested in Bot Manager. If it is possible to restrict bot traffic, which accounts for most internet bandwidth, then the risk of unauthorized logins and product hoarding can be reduced, and users can be provided with a safer and more pleasant web surfing experience.
“We want to make full use of Akamai’s services in pursuit of a better UX, security, and performance,” Sato says. “We have already acquired the tools to optimize our digital services. Moving forward, we want to make better use of these tools to create a better user experience. But we can’t provide a perfect service using our company’s resources alone. We need our partners’ support. In the future, we want Akamai Technologies to continue making their wide knowledge base available to us with suggested product applications, advice, and applied case studies.”
JINS will continue to develop new and comfortable eyewear experiences for its customers. Meanwhile, it will be Akamai technology that powers the optimization of their digital services to fulfill this vision.
About JINS Online Store
JINS Holdings designs, manufactures, and sells eyewear products, like eyeglasses, contact lenses, and wearable devices, in addition to services including e-commerce and digital services. Established in 1988, JINS introduced a new model of production and sales to the Japanese eyewear market characterized by “same-day service for a low price.” The JINS chain of eyewear stores totals 428 stores in Japan (as of December 2020) in addition to stores in China, Taiwan, the United States, and elsewhere. JINS’s latest services have also been in the spotlight, including their virtual “try before you buy” service and contact lens vending machines. https://www.jins.com/
About Akamai
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