Smart Shopping

About Smart Shopping

Smart Shopping Inc., which rebranded to S-Mat Inc. on July 1, 2024, operates with a dual focus on B2C and B2B markets, centered around optimizing the flow of goods. The company was established in November 2014 by co-founders Takayuki Shiga and Hidetoshi Hayashi. Both founders graduated from Kyoto University's Graduate School of Informatics in 2005. Hayashi previously worked at Roland Berger and later Amazon Japan, where he managed subscription services and new business planning. Shiga's background includes investment banking at UBS Securities and business development at CyberAgent.

The company initially launched a B2C price comparison website, also named Smart Shopping, which allows users to compare prices for over 1.3 million products across 14 major Japanese e-commerce sites like Amazon.co.jp, Rakuten, and Yahoo! Shopping. This service caters to consumers looking for the best deals on daily necessities, food, cosmetics, and electronics.

Pivoting from their initial consumer focus, the firm introduced the "Smart Mat" in October 2017, an IoT weight-based scale for inventory management. This led to the development of their flagship B2B SaaS product, "SmartMat Cloud," officially launched for corporate clients in October 2018. This solution targets businesses in manufacturing, healthcare, and services, helping them automate inventory management. The system works by placing items on the IoT-enabled mats; once the weight drops below a preset threshold, it can trigger alerts and automatically place new orders. This "zero-click" inventory management system is designed to prevent stockouts, reduce manual labor for inventory checks and ordering, and improve overall operational productivity.

The business model for SmartMat Cloud is a subscription-based service (SaaS), generating recurring revenue from corporate clients. For consumers, the company offers "Smart Mat Lite," which automates the purchasing of household consumables. The company's strategic shift towards the B2B market proved successful, with the majority of its clients now in the manufacturing sector. This pivot was the primary driver for the rebranding to S-Mat Inc., to better reflect its core business.