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.
出荷日 vs 発送日 — the warehouse-side pair
There is a fifth and sixth term that shows up once a store grows past self-fulfilment: 出荷 and 発送.
| Term | What it marks | Who reports it |
|---|---|---|
| 出荷日 (しゅっかび) | Goods leave your warehouse or inventory | WMS, 3PL, inventory systems |
| 発送日 (はっそうび) | The parcel is handed to the carrier | Store dashboard, confirmation emails |
In a store shipping from a back room these are the same day, and the words are used interchangeably. In warehouse and 3PL operations they are genuinely separate steps: stock can be picked and staged in the morning (出荷) and collected by the carrier that evening or the next morning (発送). If your fulfilment partner reports 出荷予定日, confirm which event it means before showing it to a customer as a ship date — a one-day offset here propagates into every arrival estimate you display.
予定日 vs 希望日 — scheduled versus requested
The other axis that trips people up isn't which date, it's whose date.
| Pattern | Meaning | Set by |
|---|---|---|
| 〜予定日 | The scheduled date | The store or carrier |
| 〜希望日 | The requested date | The customer |
So 発送希望日 is the ship date the customer asks for, and 発送予定日 is the one you schedule. お届け希望日 is the arrival date they want; お届け予定日 is the one you expect. Japanese checkout flows routinely collect a 希望日 and confirm a 予定日 back — and showing both without labelling which is which is a common source of confusion, because customers read the later date as a delay.
The operational catch: collecting a 希望日 commits you to honouring it. A date picker with no capacity limit behind it is how a store ends up accepting forty orders for a day it can ship fifteen. If you offer 希望日 selection, cap each date.
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) — searched as 郵便局 | お届け予定 / 配達予定日 |
Shoppers rarely type the official carrier name. Japan Post is searched for as 郵便局 ("the post office") far more often than as 日本郵便, so if you write help content for Japanese customers, use both.
The wording marketplaces use
Most Japanese shoppers form their expectations on the big marketplaces before they reach your store, and each uses its own phrasing:
| Marketplace | Typical wording |
|---|---|
| 楽天市場 (Rakuten) | お届け日 / お届け日時指定 |
| Amazon.co.jp | お届け予定日 |
| SHEIN (シーイン) | お届け予定日 — often a wide range |
| AliExpress (アリエク) | お届け予定日 — cross-border, frequently slips |
The cross-border marketplaces matter more than their share of your traffic suggests: a shopper whose last experience of an お届け予定日 was a three-week SHEIN or AliExpress range arrives at your store with a much looser sense of what the term promises. Being specific — an actual date range, holiday-aware — is a differentiator rather than a formality.
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.