Online Shopping - World No.1 ... Amazon

Second stop: The biggest online shopping company:

Homepage is fresh, uncluttered, easy to use. Slightly concerned about the high degree of contents customization: it shows contents related to the past products or searches I browsed or executed on the site. ... Wish that they can further customize to cater to different customers' degree of acceptance to this kind of customization.

Take a look at this very cool "Amazon Acquisitions and Investments" chart (by Meet the Boss). We see that Amazon did many strategic purchases to make their inventory list covers everything other than just books.

At the same time, Amazon is also growing their arsenal of web and mobile technologies to provide more value and services to their customers. The most recent developments:

• Mobile comparison shopping: Amazon will use the iPhone as a vehicle for snagging more business from brick-and-mortar stores this holiday season (MediaPost)
• Quantity discount & sales promotion: Amazon And Groupon Partner In France As Acquisition Rumors Swirl (SFGate)
  
• Cloud computing & Web services: Nvidia makes big gains in supercomputing in deal with Amazon Web Services (VentureBeat)

Even though Amazon does not have a local online store for Singapore or Australia unlike Japan and China, it has recently launched its Asia-Pacific Amazon Web Services; based in Singapore.

Asia Pacific-focused businesses can leverage on AWS’s cloud infrastructure platform to build their businesses and run their applications. The central and most valuable of these services are reportedly Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Thinking of hosting your web site in the cloud? Here is a one-year free program from Amazon AWS.

Online Shopping - Japan No.1 ... Rakuten (楽天)

Let's do some shopping for this weekend. Online window shopping, that is.

First stop: Japan's most popular online shopping site:  Rakuten Ichiba 楽天市場 (Or Rakuten Marketplace). A massive "store front" homepage ... to match their size. From the top, we have

> Christmas specials, designed to look like a shopping catalog pamphlet, reminds me that traditional mail order / catalog shopping is still a very big market in Japan.

> Links to other business areas: Credit & Payments, Portal & Media services (Infoseek), Travel (hotel booking etc), Securities (online brokerage).

> The standard search bar and category table. Rather high word counts for a e-Shopping site. In the meantime, we read that Amazon and Google are moving towards visual search (TechCrunch).

> Bestsellers list. A must-have feature for most e-commerce sites. Also online auction, similar to Yahoo!Auction Japan.

> Machi-Raku (literally means "street happy") is an interesting concept. Rakuten engages shops, restaurants and TV celebrities to showcase the seasonal products/recipes from different prefectures.

> Rakupon : Rakuten's answer to Groupon Japan; the buzz in Japan for the last two months. Nevertheless, I think it's unlikely that Rakuten will join in the bidding for Groupon as Google or eBay (BusinessInsider SAI).


Founded in 1997, Rakuten rose to the second ranking site just after Yahoo! in 2004. Now top; its revenues exceeded US$ 3 billion in 2009 with operating profits of approximately $620M.

"The biggest difference to Amazon is that Rakuten was founded as a B2B2C company without a warehousing function." You can read more about it at this article by Serkan Toto (TechCrunch).

Today Rakuten Ichiba continues to internationalize: offering international shipping, acquired Buy.com and PriceMinister, established offices in six countries, tied up with Baidu to operate an online shopping mall....

Top Search Engines: find out what they want & give it to them

Search engines allow us to find and filter out relevant information on the internet. If doing business is "to know what people want and give it to them", then successful search sites managed to get the correct formula.

Top three search sites register more than 90 percent of all search engine traffic. According to comScore's press release, Google takes 62.6%, Yahoo 18.9% and Microsoft (Bing/Live/MSN search) 12.7% in US.　Taking country-specific versions into account, dominance of the top three is replicated almost entirely to other countries.

It may be that the powerful search algorithms make these sites popular. Nonetheless, local taste, language nuance and cultural contexts seem to be other deciding factors.

According to iResearch China, the top search sites in China are: Baidu 百度 (76%), way ahead of Google (18.9%), followed by (Tencent's 腾讯) Soso 搜搜 (3.2%) and Sogou 搜狗 (0.9%). Baidu 百度 continues to lead the market with its online marketing innovations.

In the web search market of Japan, with first-mover advantage is Yahoo! Japan (Yahoo!カテゴリ), beating Google. It is operated by the Japanese telecommunications company Softbank.

As for the case of South Korea, local players Naver.com (네이버) and Daum.net (다음) account for 77% and 10% of the local web searches respectively.

e-Commerce vs e-BizCoy Matrix: information flow

Info provider & receiver matrix

		"Info Receiver"
		Customer (C)	Business (B)
"Info Provider"	Business (B)	B2C: Amazon.com Rakuten 楽天 Taobao 淘宝网	B2B: Alibaba soldouteasy.com IndiaMART
	Customer (C)	C2C: eBay Yahoo!オークション	C2B: YouTube Baidu.com Naver(네이버)

In the familiar e-Commerce matix, we have B2B, B2C, C2C, and also G2C, G2B, etc. Here, let us look beyond commercial transactions and view e-Business from a different angle: the initial "provider" & "receiver" of information.

"Info Provider": Business or Customer provides (1)information about their product/services that they want to sell, or (2)about things they want to search, or (3)information they want to share (such as news scoop, video clips, personal details about themselves).

"Info Receiver": Business or Customer reads and reacts to the information supplied above by (1)responding to buy the product/services, or (2)finding and organizing the answers, (3)providing an internet platform to enable exchange of information.

While B2C, B2B and C2C cover most of online commercial transactions, "C2B" includes useful websites such as search engines, social networks, blogs, etc. It is easy to see that C2B is where you find the highest traffic volume.

Begin with a vision: Google and Facebook...

I am trying to determine what inspires and drives me regarding online business... Perhaps let's begin by looking at two giants to get some ideas.

Yes, many factors come into play in the growth of companies such as Google and Facebook. But they hold the keys to what people want and expect from these popular websites. Be it the services they provide or the values they bring, there must be a hint or two for us to pick up and get started with.

Bloomberg recently runs a documentary series Bloomberg Game Changers. It features the founders of Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg and Google: Sergey Brin & Larry Page. Interesting stuff.

Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive officer of Facebook Inc. and one of the world's youngest billionaires.

Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Sergey Brin and Larry Page redefined advertising, created a chain of products such as Google Maps, News, Gmail and have taken on rival giants like Apple and Microsoft.

(Video Source: Bloomberg)