TL;DR. Tokyo Tea House sells ceremonial-grade Japanese tea internationally. BigCommerce Pro's multi-storefront feature couldn't handle their per-entity locale gating cleanly, creating 1,240 hreflang errors in Google Search Console. Migrating to Ordiko cleaned the cluster in 2 weeks; international organic sales grew 2.3x in 6 months.
Background
Tokyo Tea House was founded in 2012 in Asakusa by Hiroko Tanaka. The catalog spans:
- Single-origin matcha (Uji, Nishio, Yame).
- Sencha, hojicha, genmaicha leaf teas.
- Tea ware (chawan, chasen, chashaku) sourced from specific kilns.
- Books and educational content in Japanese, English, and translated editions.
International expansion accelerated 2022–2024. By 2025 international (non-Japan) revenue was ~$48k/month spread across US (60%), UK (15%), France (10%), Germany (8%), and other (7%).
The challenge
Tokyo Tea House had been on BigCommerce Pro since 2020. The plan supported their Japan domestic store + four international storefronts (US, UK, FR, DE) under multi-storefront. But:
- Hreflang correctness was broken. Many products were translated only into JA + EN, but BigCommerce was advertising all five locale variants as if they existed. Google Search Console showed 1,240 hreflang errors growing month over month.
- Performance varied by storefront. The JA storefront was tuned; the international ones were afterthoughts. LCP on FR and DE PDPs ran 3.2–4.0s, hurting organic rankings in those markets.