BAXS, based in Tokyo, Japan, operates a service called PANAMA which launched in 2016. PANAMA works for its Japanese e-commerce customers, automating the various highly time-consuming and repetitive tasks involved in getting products online. The practice is called “sasage” in the country short for “satsuei”, (shooting pictures), “saisun”, (measuring) and “genko”, title or description-writing. Sasage results in a faster, more streamlined, and higher quality process for e-commerce upload.

To create perfect online merch pictures for PANAMA’S sasage solution, a customer attaches their camera to a PC or Mac and the system processes and edits photos of merchandise, potentially resizing them and removing backgrounds. The service also uses barcodes to automatically associate the merchandising data and the photos on the server. Additionally, BAXS runs a photography studio for customers without their own.

Once copy and other product information such as material and sizing have been added into the appropriate fields, it is added to an online inventory and the customer can distribute images to e-commerce sites such as Amazon or Shopify with one click.

PANAMA is an ideal solution for small brands who now no longer need to hire photo editors as well as the online malls popular in Japan. It is also in demand with larger brands and malls.

Unique among software providers, PANAMA lets customers see the completed images in real time whereas they used to have to wait for days. This means e-commerce clients can make alterations to the process or retake photos as they go if there are any issues.

Other benefits PANAMA offers customers include renaming, outlining, and adding shadows to images. It drastically reduces the number of person-hours required to carry out the work, improving operational efficiency and reducing costs.

Removing backgrounds is often a crucial part of the merch-uploading process since many marketplaces, such as Amazon, demand items to have a pure white background.

Traditionally, Japanese retailers would outsource this work to photo-editors in another country such as India or Bangladesh at a cost of 50 cents – 1 USD per image and an overnight service.

With remove.bg, BAXS’ customers can cut the time and costs of this operation and the company has been using a background-removal service from the get-go.

The company started working with remove.bg three years ago and adds on a small cost per image processed to the customer to upsell the tool and make an extra profit.

BAXS needed a solution to create a shadow and remove.bg was the best solution. remove.bg can create transparent .png data – well suited for creating shadow images via PANAMA’S server.

As a complement, BAXS decided to use remove.bg (which simply isolates the featured object) and add the shadow in later through their own special collage process: after remove.bg goes to work, they add another background with a shadow created on the server, automatically overlaying one on the other to create merch images.

“The shadow looks really natural,” says Takahiro Murata, the company’s president.

Even where remove.bg fails to do a perfect job, say if a bag is white, the solution still saves time for PANAMA customers since they can download both before and after images to Photoshop and work on them there. The time taken is cut from ten minutes to a minute or 30 seconds, Takahiro says.

Usually, PANAMA features a remove.bg button which customers have to click to remove backgrounds. Customers pay an extra cost to remove backgrounds over and above their subscription.

“Remove.bg offers a major benefit to customers,” says Takahiro, “because the previously time-consuming task of removing backgrounds can be done in one click. That’s something really magical.”

Implementing remove.bg was extremely simple according to the team. “The API documentation was very easy to understand and we had no problem implementing the tool,” says Takahiro.

The company was delighted by the improved success rate remove.bg provided the first time they used it. Internet-ready background removal jumped from between 50-60% with the original solution to 70%. It then climbed from 80% two years ago to 95% today.

As a result of implementing remove.bg, the company saw a jump in images processed 10x since starting to use remove.bg. Indeed, this has doubled in the past month. This is mainly attributable to one of their large customers deciding to use PANAMA for nearly all their product uploading.

“Many more of our customers started removing backgrounds where they maybe weren’t before,” adds Jay Mehta, Sasage Tech Engineer at BAXS.

He says it’s impossible for the company to know how much time, money and labor has been saved by remove.bg since these are metrics their customers measure. However, he adds that the application could not have been this successful so far without remove.bg.

With regards to customer service, BAXS is also happy with remove.bg.

“Your team has always notified us when credits are running out so we don’t end up paying for an overdraft and that credits don’t lapse,” says Takahiro.

In the future, BAXS is interested in exploring remove.bg’s quality improvement program with their customer success manager to see if they can further improve the success rate.