Quick Overview: The Three Major Japanese Platforms Are All Racing to Make This Standard
Most people comparing BASE, STORES, Color Me Shop, and Shopify want to know, with serious overseas expansion in mind, which platform is actually ready for cross-border e-commerce. Between 2025 and 2026, BASE, STORES, and Color Me Shop have each moved to offer overseas-sales features, built on partnerships with external services, as standard functionality at no extra cost. This guide compares the basic specs of all four, how each platform's cross-border feature actually works, the difference in upfront investment versus ongoing cost, how rich each platform's payment-method coverage is by target country, and how easily each lets you move from domestic sales into cross-border e-commerce.
Basic Specs of the Four Major Platforms
BASE's Standard plan has no setup fee or monthly fee, charging roughly 6.6% of sales plus ¥40 per order in combined processing and service fees — a performance-based model. STORES offers a Free plan (¥0/month) and a Standard plan (from ¥3,300/month). Color Me Shop runs on fixed monthly plans starting with its Regular plan (from ¥4,950/month), and its official site states "0 yen sales commission." Shopify is a globally dominant e-commerce platform, with a cost structure built around a monthly plan fee, payment processing fees, and various app usage fees.
How Each Platform Handles Overseas Shipping, Multiple Languages, and Multi-Currency Payment
BASE: "Easy Overseas Sales" Becomes a Standard Feature
BASE rolled out "Easy Overseas Sales" to an early-access group of shops starting January 2026, then made it a standard feature for all BASE shops on March 18, 2026. Under this feature, the system detects access from overseas and shows a dedicated overseas cart, letting international buyers complete checkout right there. On the seller's side, want.jp — a BASE group company — handles the domestic proxy purchase, so sellers just ship to want.jp's warehouse the same way they handle a domestic order. The fee is 5% of the payment amount, charged only when an overseas sale actually happens, with no setup fee or fixed monthly cost (BASE's regular plan-based fees apply separately as usual). BASE's older "Overseas Sales Proxy App" and its integration with the logistics service NEOlogi still exist, but "Easy Overseas Sales" is now the central feature.
STORES's Cross-Border Approach: Integration with WorldShopping BIZ
STORES handles cross-border sales through an integration with "WorldShopping BIZ," which lets sellers reach 228 countries and regions without significantly changing their domestic shipping and operations. It's positioned as a way to start selling overseas with no setup fee, monthly fee, or shipping cost — the service handles order intake, shipping, and customer inquiries from overseas buyers, while the seller just ships to a designated domestic warehouse. Store-facing language display can also be switched to English.
Color Me Shop: "ZenLink" Automatically Enabled Across All Shops
Color Me Shop made its cross-border service "ZenLink" a standard feature starting July 22, 2025. According to its official announcement, the feature is automatically enabled for essentially all shops, charges sellers no fee at all, and has overseas shipping costs and the service fee borne by the overseas buyer instead. It supports 19 languages and more than 150 payment methods. Sellers need no special multilingual setup or overseas-sales preparation — ZenGroup handles overseas orders as a proxy purchase just like a domestic order, so sellers simply ship to their usual domestic logistics center.
Shopify: Cross-Border Built In as a Standard Platform Feature
Unlike BASE, STORES, and Color Me Shop, Shopify builds cross-border functionality directly into the platform itself rather than relying on an external service integration. The core of this is "Shopify Markets." According to Shopify's official site, you can create a market just by selecting a target region and products, and preview exactly what each market's customers will see, including product and price display. For language and currency, you can localize your store to match a region's language, and customers can pay in their own currency when you use Shopify Payments. Tax settings can also be configured per market, though the official page doesn't spell out the specifics of any tariff or customs-duty calculation. You can run each market under its own URL or a subfolder, in a setup described as designed to limit the impact on SEO.
Upfront Investment vs. Ongoing Cost
BASE, STORES, and Color Me Shop share one thing in common: their cross-border feature itself carries no setup fee or fixed monthly cost. BASE charges 5% only on overseas sales; Color Me Shop's ZenLink fee is borne by the overseas buyer; STORES states no setup, monthly, or shipping fee. In practice, sellers face little to no added cost on any of the three. Shopify, by contrast, doesn't list a specific extra charge for Markets itself, but your overall running cost stacks up from Shopify's own monthly plan fee, processing fees, and whatever multilingual or multi-currency apps you add as needed. If you want to start small domestically and only pay costs tied to actual overseas sales, the standard features from BASE, STORES, and Color Me Shop are the easier entry point; if you want to seriously build out each overseas market, that's where investing in Shopify becomes the relevant decision.
Payment-Method Coverage by Target Country
On payment-method coverage, Color Me Shop's ZenLink states support for more than 150 payment methods — among the figures that are clearly stated, that's the richest. STORES's WorldShopping BIZ touts coverage of 228 countries and regions, standing out for breadth of reach. Shopify is built around Shopify Payments, letting markets support local-currency payment, but its official page doesn't give a specific number of supported payment methods. If your target markets span many countries or regions, it's worth comparing based on the breadth of supported payment methods.
How Easily Each Lets You Move from Domestic to Cross-Border Selling
What BASE, STORES, and Color Me Shop share is an approach of "outsourcing overseas shipping and multilingual handling to a specialized external service," rather than making the platform's own e-commerce functionality multilingual and multi-currency. With any of these three, a shop that's been running domestically can start accepting overseas orders with almost no additional setup work. Shopify takes more effort to configure Markets yourself, but in exchange offers the freedom to build out pricing display and product pages down to the detail for local customers. Which approach fits depends on whether you want to "try cross-border e-commerce on a small scale first" or "seriously build out overseas markets" — matching the platform to that phase of your overseas expansion is what leads to a choice you won't regret.
Comparing the overseas-sales features of these four platforms is an important first step, but actually running cross-border e-commerce brings up practical work that platform features alone don't solve — multilingual product descriptions, responding to inquiries from overseas customers, and more. Leap's AI E-Commerce Agent is built with an eye toward supporting everything from domestic sales through cross-border e-commerce and overseas expansion, with the idea that AI can support this kind of overseas-specific practical work too, through conversation.
FAQ
Q. Do I need to apply separately for BASE's, STORES's, or Color Me Shop's overseas sales features?
A. As of 2026, both BASE's "Easy Overseas Sales" and Color Me Shop's "ZenLink" are standard features that get enabled automatically. STORES's "WorldShopping BIZ" is offered as an integrated service. In some cases you may be able to disable these if you don't want them, following the steps in each platform's help center — check the details there.
Q. Is Shopify better than BASE, STORES, and Color Me Shop for cross-border readiness?
A. Not necessarily one way or the other. BASE, STORES, and Color Me Shop let you start selling overseas quickly with no added cost, by outsourcing to an external service. Shopify takes more effort to configure each market yourself, but offers the freedom to fine-tune pricing display and product pages for local customers. Which is "better" depends on how deeply you want to build out each overseas market.
Q. Can all four sell to the same countries?
A. Coverage varies by platform. STORES's WorldShopping BIZ covers 228 countries and regions, and Color Me Shop's ZenLink supports 19 languages and more than 150 payment methods. For BASE's "Easy Overseas Sales" and Shopify Markets, it's worth checking each platform's help center for the latest coverage details.
Summary and Key Takeaway
The fact that BASE, STORES, and Color Me Shop have each rushed, between 2025 and 2026, to build out cross-border features as standard functionality at no added cost shows that the barrier to overseas expansion is steadily dropping for shops that started small domestically. At the same time, Shopify's option of building things out directly on the platform itself still holds real value for businesses aiming at serious overseas market development. The question worth asking isn't "does this platform support cross-border e-commerce" — it's "how deeply do we actually want to build out overseas markets." Comparing the four through that lens is what leads to a platform choice you won't regret.
For more on this, see our comparison of BASE, STORES, and Shopify on cross-border readiness specifically, and our detailed guide to migrating from BASE to Shopify.
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References
- BASE Pricing Plans - BASE official
- "BASE" Makes "Easy Overseas Sales" a Standard Feature Starting March 18 - Impress Netshop
- Cross-Border Service "ZenLink" Now Standard on Color Me Shop by GMO Pepabo - Color Me Shop Official Announcement
- Color Me Shop Pricing Plans - Color Me Shop official
- Shopify Markets - Shopify official
