Japanese ecommerce uses four different words that all translate to something like "delivery date" in English. They are not synonyms, and mixing them up is a routine source of customer complaints for stores selling into Japan.
If you only remember one thing: 発送予定日 is when it leaves you. お届け予定日 is when it reaches the customer. Everything else is detail.
Quick answer: what each Japanese delivery date term means
| Term | Reading | Literally | What it actually means | Where you'll see it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 発送予定日 | はっそうよていび | scheduled dispatch date | The day the seller hands the parcel to the carrier | Order confirmation emails, seller dashboards |
| 配送予定日 | はいそうよていび | scheduled transport date | The day the parcel is expected out for delivery | Carrier tracking, storefronts |
| お届け予定日 | おとどけよていび | scheduled hand-over date | The day it reaches the customer | Consumer storefronts, carrier tracking |
| 着荷予定日 | ちゃっかよていび | scheduled arrival date | Same as お届け予定日, in a B2B register | Invoices, purchase orders, wholesale docs |
The two that matter most for a storefront are 発送予定日 and お届け予定日, and the distance between them is transit time.
発送予定日 — the ship date
発送予定日 is the day the parcel leaves. It is a fact about your operation: your production or picking lead time, your cutoff, and your dispatch schedule. It says nothing about how long the carrier then takes.
Order placed: Monday
Lead time: 1 business day
発送予定日: Tuesday ← the parcel leaves you
Transit: 1-3 days
お届け予定日: Wednesday - Friday ← it reaches the customer
This is the term to use in an order confirmation email, where "we'll ship it Tuesday" is genuinely the useful fact. It is the wrong term for a product page, because a shopper reading 発送予定日 as an arrival date will believe you are two to three days faster than you are — and will contact you when the parcel hasn't arrived on a day it was never going to arrive.
お届け予定日 — the arrival date
お届け予定日 is the day the parcel reaches the customer. This is what shoppers are actually asking about, and it's the term that belongs on a product page and in the cart.
It's an estimate, not a promise: lead time plus transit time, with non-business days excluded. Japanese shoppers are comfortable with a range — 「7月10日〜7月11日」 reads as honest, whereas a single confident date that slips reads as a broken promise.
配送予定日 — the one in between
配送予定日 sits between the two and is the fuzziest of the four. 配送 refers to the transport leg — the carrier moving the parcel — so 配送予定日 technically means the day it's expected to be out for delivery.
In practice, Japanese ecommerce uses it close to interchangeably with お届け予定日, and most shoppers read the two as the same thing. If you're choosing wording for a storefront, お届け予定日 is the less ambiguous choice.
着荷予定日 — the B2B term
着荷予定日 means the same as お届け予定日 — the day goods arrive — but in a business register. You'll see it on invoices, purchase orders and wholesale paperwork, not on consumer shopping sites.
If you sell both B2C and B2B from one Shopify store, this is worth getting right: using 着荷予定日 on a consumer product page reads as oddly formal, and using お届け予定日 on a wholesale invoice reads as oddly casual.
Which term do Japanese carriers use?
The carriers are not perfectly consistent with each other, which is a large part of why shoppers find this confusing.
| Carrier | Typical wording in tracking |
|---|---|
| ヤマト運輸 (Yamato) | お届け予定日時 — date and time slot |
| 佐川急便 (Sagawa) | お届け予定日 |
| 日本郵便 (Japan Post) | お届け予定 / 配達予定日 |
Note 日本郵便's 配達予定日 — a fifth variant, 配達 rather than 配送, meaning the delivery act itself. If your storefront says 配送予定日 and the tracking page the customer lands on says お届け予定日時, they may reasonably think they've been given two different dates.
Practical rule: use the same term your primary carrier shows. Consistency matters more than which of the near-synonyms you pick.
What this means for a Shopify store selling into Japan
Three decisions follow from the above:
- Show an arrival estimate on product pages, not a ship date. Calculate it as lead time plus transit time, and exclude weekends and Japanese public holidays — Golden Week, お盆 and the New Year period will otherwise make your estimates systematically wrong at exactly the times demand peaks.
- Use 発送予定日 in confirmation emails, clearly labelled, so the ship date and the arrival estimate never appear as two competing dates.
- Let customers choose where the date genuinely matters. For gifts, perishables, and anything needing 置き配 or a time slot, an estimate isn't enough — offer a delivery date and time-slot picker so the customer sets the expectation themselves.
Related reading
- What "estimated delivery date" means and how to show one — the general concept, not Japan-specific
- Estimated delivery dates and Japanese holidays — why holiday-aware counting matters here
- 置き配 on Shopify — unattended delivery, and what it does to arrival expectations
- Carrier CSV export for Yamato, Sagawa and Japan Post — getting the date onto the shipping label
OrderRules shows a holiday-aware arrival estimate on product pages and lets customers pick a delivery date and time slot at checkout, including Japanese carrier slot templates. It's on the Advanced plan, with a 14-day free trial.