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.
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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....
