Zappos and Zozotown

Two internet sensations in two different countries. One selling shoes and the other clothes.

Both faced the same initial skepticism that consumers wouldn't buy shoes or clothes they couldn't try on. And now, both are the most popular sites for the respective products that they carry.

Their secrets? Same things that both focus on: customer service and company culture.

First, Zozotown. You can get a feel of the company's working environment in this video.

Next, Zappos' coverage on Nightline; dated August 2008.

2011: Enough of Groupon. But more Group Buying please.

Groupon Japan had a big media coverage right at the start of this new year.

The news was all over three major Tokyo TV morning shows. More than 500 Japanese ordered their traditional New Year feast, Osechi meal set at 50% discount for ¥10,500. It is a once-a-year event, when family members gathered to celebrate with a sumptuous meal. But to their horror, the meal set turned out to be ...

You can read more on TokyoInsider Groupon, Bird Cafe, and the Japanese New Year Osechi. Beyond cost savings, managing varied quality standards of participating companies is going to be a challenge. By the way, the blog article comes complete with a Groupon's google ads below...

Moving on. This group buying concept is not likely to go away. With careful planning and execution, it may attract more traffic to your online shop. Take a look at Uniqlo's idea. Real time discount and price updates on its web when more people registered to buy the same item.

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.