Tokyo-based Base, the e-commerce platform provider dubbed Japan’s answer to Shopify, announced on Friday that the IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has been approved. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on October 25 with plans to offer 405,000 shares for public subscription and to sell about 1.2 million shares in over-allotment options for a total of about 7.6 million shares. The underwriting will be led by Daiwa Securities while Base’s ticker code will be 4477. Its share price range will be released on October 8 with bookbuilding scheduled to start on October 9 and pricing on October 17. According to the consolidated statement as of December 2018, they posted revenue of 2.35 billion yen (about $21.7 million) with an ordinary loss of 798 million yen (about $7.4 million). Led by founder and CEO Yuta Tsuruoka (19.9%), the company’s major shareholders include VC firm Global Brain (19%), SBI Ventures Two / FinTech Business Innovation (15.4%), Japanese tech giant CyberAgent (9.6%), Japanese department store operator Marui Group (6.7%), Japanese sell-and-buy platform Mercari (6.6%), Japanese serial entrepreneur / angel investor Kazuma Ieiri’s Partyfactory (5.6%), and East Ventures (5.5%). See also: Japanese e-commerce platform Base raises $13M,…
Image credit: Base
Tokyo-based Base, the e-commerce platform provider dubbed Japan’s answer to Shopify, announced on Friday that the IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has been approved. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on October 25 with plans to offer 405,000 shares for public subscription and to sell about 1.2 million shares in over-allotment options for a total of about 7.6 million shares. The underwriting will be led by Daiwa Securities while Base’s ticker code will be 4477.
Its share price range will be released on October 8 with bookbuilding scheduled to start on October 9 and pricing on October 17. According to the consolidated statement as of December 2018, they posted revenue of 2.35 billion yen (about $21.7 million) with an ordinary loss of 798 million yen (about $7.4 million).
Led by founder and CEO Yuta Tsuruoka (19.9%), the company’s major shareholders include VC firm Global Brain (19%), SBI Ventures Two / FinTech Business Innovation (15.4%), Japanese tech giant CyberAgent (9.6%), Japanese department store operator Marui Group (6.7%), Japanese sell-and-buy platform Mercari (6.6%), Japanese serial entrepreneur / angel investor Kazuma Ieiri’s Partyfactory (5.6%), and East Ventures (5.5%).
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Base, the e-commerce platform provider dubbed Japan’s answer to Shopify, announced on Thursday that it has fundraised 1.5 billion yen (about $13.3 million US) from Japanese VC firm Global Brain and Japanese accounting SaaS (Software as a service) provider Money Forward (TSE:3994). This round was led by Global Brain but no financial term of the deal has been disclosed. Base has partnered with Money Forward to share a potential user base of SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) with each others. Using the funds, Base plans to strengthen hiring talents to solidify management foundation. On the same day, Base announced that it has spun off payments platform businesses, such as PAY.JP and PAY ID, to set up a fully-owned subsidiary called Pay. Kenichi Takano, the current project leader for payment platform businesses at Base, was appointed CEO for the new company while Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka joined the management board. See also: Base, Japan’s answer to Shopify, snags $14M to strengthen payment solutions unit Expanding beyond e-commerce platform The highly anticipated e-commerce platform has been advanced to the next stage by serving 450,000 merchants and 3 million mobile app users while their payments business…
L to R: Pay CEO Kenichi Takano, Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka Image credit: Base
Tokyo-based Base, the e-commerce platform provider dubbed Japan’s answer to Shopify, announced on Thursday that it has fundraised 1.5 billion yen (about $13.3 million US) from Japanese VC firm Global Brain and Japanese accounting SaaS (Software as a service) provider Money Forward (TSE:3994). This round was led by Global Brain but no financial term of the deal has been disclosed. Base has partnered with Money Forward to share a potential user base of SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) with each others. Using the funds, Base plans to strengthen hiring talents to solidify management foundation.
On the same day, Base announced that it has spun off payments platform businesses, such as PAY.JP and PAY ID, to set up a fully-owned subsidiary called Pay. Kenichi Takano, the current project leader for payment platform businesses at Base, was appointed CEO for the new company while Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka joined the management board.
The highly anticipated e-commerce platform has been advanced to the next stage by serving 450,000 merchants and 3 million mobile app users while their payments business has processed transactions 40 times more than that one year ago. Tsuruoka showed his confidence by seeing some actual performance indicators are higher than disclosed ones while his company claims that it saw the greatest growth last year since its launch.
In response to our question about the situation of Base Live, the company’s recently-launched live commerce platform that enables merchants to introduce and sell products through live performance, he told us that it still gives them some impact on transactions while there are many apparel merchants whose monthly sales reach nearly 1 million yen ($8,800). However, the live commerce platform has become popular among merchants in view of another channel for creating a fan base.
This large-scale funding may be based on all these results. Regarding the purpose of the funding, Tsuruoka says:
Our funding purpose has been changed from surviving to growing.
No doubt that the payments business was spun off because this space has high potential for extensive growth. While the Base platform has been esteemed because it allows anyone to easily build an e-commerce presence, the company’s payments businesses have to deal with different types of data and serve diverse user demographics. So the company spin-out is reasonable in optimizing their decision-making process from now on.
The company now has a staff of about 100 people, which is doubled from last year, including 20 staffers in charge of payments businesses.
On a related note, Base unveiled on Thursday that it has launched another fully-owned subsidiary called Base Bank. They claim the new company will target a new business area but no further details have been disclosed. In view of Japanese C2C marketplace startup Mercari having invested in Base and founded a new business-focused subsidiary called Souzoh, Base Bank may aim at a similar goal like building various apps and diversifying businesses.
Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. As per some media reports, Tokyo-based Base, the Japanese startup behind an instant e-commerce platform, recently announced it has fundraised a total of 1.5 billion yen (about $14.4 million) from SBI Investment, SMBC Venture Capital and Suneight Investment. The details of the plan concerning the investment ratio or the payment date were not disclosed. The secured money will be spent upon hiring additional personnel in order to expand business for the e-commerce platform Base and the payment platform PAY.JP. See also: Japanese e-commerce platform Base raises $3M from Global Brain Japanese e-commerce platform provider Base raises $2M from CyberAgent Japanese e-commerce platform provider Base introduces new iPhone app Base: The Japanese freemium e-commerce platform that’s following Shopify’s lead Currently 300,000 online stores is open on Base and the number of PAY ID which works as customer ID reached 200,000. Therefore, the annual transaction amount now totals at tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of dollars) according to Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka. There has been plenty of topics in this arena, such as one of the rival companies STORES.jp unveiling its new development to become a private-held company again; overseas competitor The Stripe’s…
As per some media reports, Tokyo-based Base, the Japanese startup behind an instant e-commerce platform, recently announced it has fundraised a total of 1.5 billion yen (about $14.4 million) from SBI Investment, SMBC Venture Capital and Suneight Investment. The details of the plan concerning the investment ratio or the payment date were not disclosed. The secured money will be spent upon hiring additional personnel in order to expand business for the e-commerce platform Base and the payment platform PAY.JP.
Currently 300,000 online stores is open on Base and the number of PAY ID which works as customer ID reached 200,000. Therefore, the annual transaction amount now totals at tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of dollars) according to Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka.
There has been plenty of topics in this arena, such as one of the rival companies STORES.jp unveiling its new development to become a private-held company again; overseas competitor The Stripe’s entering the Japan market in the financial sector including payment, investment and remittance; Coiney’s expansion into online business from its offline field; or, the appearance of AnyPay led by a serial entrepreneur Shinji Kimura.
The Bridge interviewed Tsuruoka about how Base which has succeeded in large-scale fundraising will compete in this era in a “warring nations.”
The Bridge: First of all, I would like to ask you about Base’s development plan. I am wondering if the pace of growth will become modest soon and whether you have any ideas such as strengthening sales promotion which targets enterprise merchants?
I assume you mean to ask if we are going to make something like a Rakuten (TSE:4755) or not. This is the same situation I think for STORES.jp. Regarding this point, we came to a crossroads about a year ago.
Sales promotion is a must-do in acquiring stores with hundreds of millions of yen sales, but it is more efficient to automatically acquire small stores with sales of less than millions of yen. I think that style befits the situation. Since the stores acquired through sales promotion could be stolen away by sales promotion, I do not want to compete in such a field.
From the perspective of being a technology company, I would like to take on the creation of a good product in order to form an ecosystem semi-automatically and make people happy through the power of technology.
The Bridge: What was the purpose of launching a mall app?
It was to challenge selling products as Base. The way we were going, we could estimate where we would end up businesswise, so we decided to enhance the budget and human resources at that point in time. It is not still clear if that answer is the mall or the media but we will continue to strengthen those parts too.
The Bridge: Is it a method to attract a lot of customers?
It aims to gain customers who purchase products on the web once a month but could purchase them twice or thrice in a month because we cannot become a Rakuten or an Amazon. Rather, we provide a system of helping stores instead of us gathering people easily. Although the mall has an image as proactively gathering customers in general, I look upon our mall as a method of supporting management of stores after gathering customers.
The Bridge: I understand it is the policy to increase LTV (Life Time Value) under the current growth situation. On the other hand, Mercari — which invested in your company — has succeeded with the style of expanding its body size anyhow. It there any possibility of doing like that?
I think that it is a good idea to expand the body size eagerly as a challenge. Since it has become quite common recently for a customer who purchased a product to purchase it again at other stores, I think that is worth trying.
L to R: Kazuma Ieiri (Co-founder of Base), Shintaro Yamada (CEO of Mercari), Yuta Tsuruoka (CEO of Base), Fumiaki Koizumi (CFO of Mercari)
The Bridge: What did Shintaro Yamada of Mercari advise you?
He told me to be on the offensive (laughing).
Based on the fact that Base is growing modestly and that there are only a few platforms grasping merchants as much as we do, he told us to take on as much challenges as possible. I received a lot of advice through information exchange using Mercari’s data that could be disclosed.
The Bridge: What was the advice especially helpful to you?
About organization. We had fully changed our company’s organization. Since initially any organization did not exist, we started reforming from this spring and have become a company capable of having a report line or more staffers.
My work content has also changed drastically. Although I had been in the very middle of the creation process until last year, I have moved to a more “upper” (executive-like) position now. I am not working as a communication hub by leaving responsible persons with the power of discretion to some extent. But I still cannot act like Shintaro who keeps staying in US for a long time (laugh).
The Bridge: What is the priority for your company?
Although the priority of recruitment was lower until last year, it has become a top priority now. With Mercari’s style spreading to us, we intend to form a new employee-friendly work environment. I had not been aware of the importance of recruitment well because I had been involved in our business since university. Mercari was the first external company for me, so that it was easy to absorb the culture.
The Bridge: How have you been with co-founder Kazuma Ieiri?
We meet three or four times a week even now, but he mainly tends to discuss his current project CAMFIRE rather than Base (laugh).
Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka
Competing in the financial vertical
The Bridge: What is the most valuable number for you now?
Of course we make much of the total transaction amount which is growing to the hundreds of million dollars in scale annually, so we aim the next digit.
The Bridge: In the stage of the next digit, Mercari stands as a Goliath. Do you have any ideas about expanding business into the C2C field as a management person?
The business characteristics between us and them are completely different; the culture is different from the player in the SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) arena, and the customers differ too. There are some elements in their products which can be a useful reference for us. However, originally we started our business with a theme how much we can optimize the exchange of value. Of course, it is no doubt that a drastic increase in the transaction amount is better, but it is highly doubtful whether it would lead to our company’s mission directly.
Some people say the C2C market has a higher potential growth than the SME one, but I do not agree with that. Look at Rakuten. It is huge enough.
The Bridge: As for payment business, the service directions are gradually being clarified, such as short-term loans, payments and remittances. What is PAY.JP especially focusing on?
Maybe I would start from payment service first. PAY ID is available for 300,000 stores and is linked to 200,000 users now. This is the situation I was looking forward to and I think it is a good timing as a whole.
The Bridge: Is there any rival company to watch out for?
Thankfully, we are faced with many rival companies in all time-periods (laugh).
The Bridge: I feel Mr. Kimura (of AnyPay) has a philosophy which seems close to ours. I suppose their direction is to replace trading with money to that using the Internet, so that could lead into the remittance and financial areas in the future.
We had focused on how much we can increase the number of merchants over the past three years. Now the team has separated into Base team for gathering stores and PAY.JP team for gathering consumers, and I think we have entered a new phase focused on increasing the number of consumers.
The Bridge: Thank you for your time today.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. Base, the Japanese startup behind the e-commerce platform of the same name, announced today that it has fundraised 300 million yen (or about $3 million) from Japanese investment firm Global Brain. Coinciding with this announcement, Global Brain’s Kazuhiko Fukayama has joined the company’s board and East Ventures‘ Takanori Oshiba was appointed as an auditor for the e-commerce company. In addition, the company also announced that former GMO Pepapo executive Hiroto Shin will also join the board as COO. Shin is perhaps best known for launching the e-commerce business Color Me Shop at his previous company. According to Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka, this funding was planned prior to their previous $2 million funding from CyberAgent. So they’ve succeeded in raising around $5 million as initially planned. Tsuruoka tells us that they have acquired more than 80,000 merchants to date. That’s an impressive total, up from 50,000 merchants when we previously spoke with him back in October. We asked him whether or not his startup can keep growing at a good pace, to which he replied: There are 1.6 million retailers nationwide in Japan. If you consider the number of stores dealing with daily use items,…
Base, the Japanese startup behind the e-commerce platform of the same name, announced today that it has fundraised 300 million yen (or about $3 million) from Japanese investment firm Global Brain. Coinciding with this announcement, Global Brain’s Kazuhiko Fukayama has joined the company’s board and East Ventures‘ Takanori Oshiba was appointed as an auditor for the e-commerce company. In addition, the company also announced that former GMO Pepapo executive Hiroto Shin will also join the board as COO. Shin is perhaps best known for launching the e-commerce business Color Me Shop at his previous company.
According to Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka, this funding was planned prior to their previous $2 million funding from CyberAgent. So they’ve succeeded in raising around $5 million as initially planned.
Tsuruoka tells us that they have acquired more than 80,000 merchants to date. That’s an impressive total, up from 50,000 merchants when we previously spoke with him back in October.
We asked him whether or not his startup can keep growing at a good pace, to which he replied:
There are 1.6 million retailers nationwide in Japan. If you consider the number of stores dealing with daily use items, I think we can target around 300,000 or 400,000 merchants on our platform. But if we consider independent creators as potential merchants, I think there’s no limit to our future growth.
Their t-shirt printing service on the platform got pretty good popularity among users. If they can acquire independent creators providing such services, then there’s a huge potential out there. From that perspective, their market may be overlap with other C2C focused companies in Japan like Mercari and Fril. The more their user base grows, then a variety of potential business model open up.
This is part five of our CNet Japan Startup Awards nominee rundown. The rest can be found here. Search and recommendation are a tough nut to crack, especially when it comes to e-commerce. We are overloaded by information, and technology struggles to parse relevance that can match our needs. Users now expect sites and services to know what we want before we know we want it (see Amazon and Netflix recommendation algos, for instance). This is a problem that needs solving regardless of where you live, and it can be a huge opportunity for startups to address a real consumer need. Enter Monoco and Rinkak, looking to connect designers with consumers. Think of them as Japan’s answer to Etsy or Fab. Meanwhile Base is the local version of Squarespace, Shopify, and Strikingly. All three are doing interesting things in Japan’s e-commerce space these days, attempting to solve the same difficult issues that face e-commerce businesses abroad. Monoco Monoco is an e-commerce site focused on selling fashion and craft goods of limited quantities for limited times. The items are curated by buyers the around the globe, and since the site’s launch in April of 2012, it has acquired more than 87,000…
Search and recommendation are a tough nut to crack, especially when it comes to e-commerce. We are overloaded by information, and technology struggles to parse relevance that can match our needs. Users now expect sites and services to know what we want before we know we want it (see Amazon and Netflix recommendation algos, for instance). This is a problem that needs solving regardless of where you live, and it can be a huge opportunity for startups to address a real consumer need.
Enter Monoco and Rinkak, looking to connect designers with consumers. Think of them as Japan’s answer to Etsy or Fab. Meanwhile Base is the local version of Squarespace, Shopify, and Strikingly. All three are doing interesting things in Japan’s e-commerce space these days, attempting to solve the same difficult issues that face e-commerce businesses abroad.
Monoco
Monoco is an e-commerce site focused on selling fashion and craft goods of limited quantities for limited times. The items are curated by buyers the around the globe, and since the site’s launch in April of 2012, it has acquired more than 87,000 users, with more than 1100 designers worldwide.
Because of the quantity and time constraints, it could be easy to write off Monoco as just another flash sales site. But browsing through the site, I think this format makes sense.
When you first log-on, you are immediately greeted by professional grade, high quality images. The products are carefully chosen, often a unique spin on regular products like mugs, phone accessories, handbags, and clothing. It’s easy to lose yourself scrolling and scrolling as you browse the many product offerings.
On the product pages, prices are hidden unless you are a registered user. And this is a pretty clever way to subtly encourage user registration.
The limited sale period and quantity creates a sense of urgency for the user to purchase, and it cycles products to surface designers. It’s a different way to approach recommendation, increasing the site’s overall stickiness factor as users will check, and re-check the site to see new items.
In July, Monoco announced series A funding of an undisclosed amount.
Rinkak
Rinkak (the name means ‘outline of object’ in Japanese) is a 3D printing marketplace that is Japan’s answer to Shapeways. The site opened to the public in September.
They offer a platform for anyone with 3D data to sell their printed designs. Like Shapeways, they offer various materials like plastic, pottery and metals.
3D printing seems to finally be gaining traction beyond the scope of early tech adopters. Shapeways, founded in 2007, most recently closed a $30 million series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with a total of $47.3 million raised thus far. With a physical shop, distribution center in NYC, and an API to encourage 3D printing apps, they are clearly the 3D printing market place leader in the US startup space. Let’s wait and see what Rinkak will do similarly or differently. For more on Rinkak, check out our previous feature back in September.
Base
Often referred to as Japan’s Shopify, Base’s e-commerce site is the marketing platform for the founder’s true vision: a mobile payment solution platform. Base has raised a total of $4.73 million and has expanded its team from 12 to 20 people. The CEO states they have acquired 50,000 merchants in the past year, with a monthly growth of 10% when we last spoke with them.
It’s rapid growth shows Japanese small- to mid-sized merchants are looking for e-commerce solutions other than Rakuten and Amazon. 70% of Base’s user activity comes from smartphones — another clear indication that Japanese e-commerce behaviors are shifting.
You can check out the company’s brief promo video below.
Good luck to all three startups on Tuesday night at the CNet Japan Startup Awards.
See the original story in Japanese. Japanese e-commerce platform provider Base announced today that it will raise 200 million (approximately $2 million) from Japanese internet giant CyberAgent. This will be the first investment from the latter’s new fund targeting middle- and late-stage startups, also known as Fujita Fund after the company’s CEO Susumu Fujita. According to Base’s CEO Yuta Tsuruoka, his company also raised 50 million yen ($500,000) from Sun Eight Investment back in July. The total amount of funds raised is about 273 million yen ($2.73 million), including investments from East Ventures, Party Factory, and angel investors. Tsuruoka describes meeting with Fujita back in August: About four months ago, I met up with him for the first time. After Rising Expo [1] back in September, I had a chance to see him and shared our KPIs. I think at that moment, he seemed to decide on the investment. When we look at how the platform was growing back in August, one of its primary sources of traffic was from Ameba, CyberAgent’s blog platform, following Facebook and Twitter. Subsequently, Tsuruoka asked his co-founder/investor Kazuma Ieiri to ask Fujita if CyberAgent was interested in investing. And to his surprise Fujita was…
Japanese e-commerce platform provider Base announced today that it will raise 200 million (approximately $2 million) from Japanese internet giant CyberAgent. This will be the first investment from the latter’s new fund targeting middle- and late-stage startups, also known as Fujita Fund after the company’s CEO Susumu Fujita.
According to Base’s CEO Yuta Tsuruoka, his company also raised 50 million yen ($500,000) from Sun Eight Investment back in July. The total amount of funds raised is about 273 million yen ($2.73 million), including investments from East Ventures, Party Factory, and angel investors.
Tsuruoka describes meeting with Fujita back in August:
About four months ago, I met up with him for the first time. After Rising Expo[1] back in September, I had a chance to see him and shared our KPIs. I think at that moment, he seemed to decide on the investment.
When we look at how the platform was growing back in August, one of its primary sources of traffic was from Ameba, CyberAgent’s blog platform, following Facebook and Twitter. Subsequently, Tsuruoka asked his co-founder/investor Kazuma Ieiri to ask Fujita if CyberAgent was interested in investing. And to his surprise Fujita was indeed interested.
With the funds raised this time, Base plans to expand its team from 12 to 20 people, and to intensify marketing and advertising efforts as well.
We have acquired 50,000 merchants in the last eleven months, showing about 10% monthly growth on average. We recently launched an iOS app, and it seems to have had a big impact for our merchants, changing their experience and environment. For example, a retailer manufacturing handmade crafts can handle all the necessary tasks with his iPhone, ranging from taking pictures of items to be sold to his store management.
70% of Base’s user activity comes from smartphones, yet another indication that the Japanese e-commerce industry has mostly transitioned to mobile. The company is exploring monetization opportunities but intends to keep focusing on user acquisition for the time being.
An annual startup showcase event by CyberAgent Ventures.↩
See the original story in Japanese. Recently we’ve seen fierce competition among two Japanese e-commerce platform builders, Stores.jp and Base. Now it seems both are moving past simple merchants acquisition, looking beyond to see what value they can add to their respective services. Bracket, the startup behind Stores.jp, yesterday unveiled a new feature that will help merchants promote their e-store on the platform, using partner e-commerce portals such as EC Navi, Kakaku.com, and Value Commerce. For merchants, if you use this promotion feature you will be asked to pay a 10% commission for a purchase made via this affiliated traffic. For merchants, products will be featured in search results on partnering portal sites, such as MSN Japan which is pictured below. The startup is exploring partnerships with many other e-commerce portal sites based on a revenue share model. The advent of these simple e-commerce platforms allows merchants to put up an online store far more easily than with conventional ASP-based shopping cart services. It has spurred an abundance of merchants to start e-businesses, but subsequently they have no way to attract new customers. The startup is trying to solve this problem, recently partnering with fashion giant Zozotown, which could be…
Recently we’ve seen fierce competition among two Japanese e-commerce platform builders, Stores.jp and Base. Now it seems both are moving past simple merchants acquisition, looking beyond to see what value they can add to their respective services.
Bracket, the startup behind Stores.jp, yesterday unveiled a new feature that will help merchants promote their e-store on the platform, using partner e-commerce portals such as EC Navi, Kakaku.com, and Value Commerce. For merchants, if you use this promotion feature you will be asked to pay a 10% commission for a purchase made via this affiliated traffic.
For merchants, products will be featured in search results on partnering portal sites, such as MSN Japan which is pictured below. The startup is exploring partnerships with many other e-commerce portal sites based on a revenue share model.
The advent of these simple e-commerce platforms allows merchants to put up an online store far more easily than with conventional ASP-based shopping cart services. It has spurred an abundance of merchants to start e-businesses, but subsequently they have no way to attract new customers. The startup is trying to solve this problem, recently partnering with fashion giant Zozotown, which could be new partner site for them in the future, in terms of helping merchants drive traffic.
Bracket’s CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto explains how they plan to evolve their e-commerce platform.
As well as keeping the image of a simple-to-launch platform, we plan to give merchants many solutions to acquire customers. We have partnered with Zozotown, but we will not change into to a fashion commerce site — we will keep going beyond what we have been doing.
Some of our readers may be familiar with the startup’s competitor Base. Base recently launched an iOS app and an interface that curates featured shops. In contrast with Base, which has not yet partnered with other sites, Stores.jp unveiled a partnership with GMO Makeshop, an e-commerce platform from GMO, one of Japan’s leading internet companies. This could be an indication that the startup might be exploring a partnership-based business.
We’ll try to keep you updated about how these two companies’ business strategies compare in the future.
See the original story in Japanese. Base is an e-commerce platform provider startup from Tokyo. It was born out of Project Liverty, a tech savvy team led by serial entrepreneur Kazuma Ieiri. In contrast with their competitor Stores.jp, the Base team has been pretty quiet recently. But they have released a new iOS app today, which allows merchants to build and manage their online shops entirely on mobile. In addition, the company has added a new feature called ‘Base Curation,’ which has an interface resembling an online shopping mall, curating featured shops. It displays users’ shops which have been selected by the company’s management, and if you would to like them to feature your shop in the menu, you can make a request via the dashboard. I asked the startup’s CEO Yuta Tsuruoka if the curation menu is a special business strategy for Base — but he said that this wasn’t quite the intention, explaining: Unlike other mall platforms (which have many tenant merchants), our service does not provide a way to find a specific shop on the platform. We want to see how we can encourage merchants to set up their online shop on our platform. When you launch…
Base is an e-commerce platform provider startup from Tokyo. It was born out of Project Liverty, a tech savvy team led by serial entrepreneur Kazuma Ieiri. In contrast with their competitor Stores.jp, the Base team has been pretty quiet recently. But they have released a new iOS app today, which allows merchants to build and manage their online shops entirely on mobile.
In addition, the company has added a new feature called ‘Base Curation,’ which has an interface resembling an online shopping mall, curating featured shops. It displays users’ shops which have been selected by the company’s management, and if you would to like them to feature your shop in the menu, you can make a request via the dashboard.
I asked the startup’s CEO Yuta Tsuruoka if the curation menu is a special business strategy for Base — but he said that this wasn’t quite the intention, explaining:
Unlike other mall platforms (which have many tenant merchants), our service does not provide a way to find a specific shop on the platform. We want to see how we can encourage merchants to set up their online shop on our platform. When you launch an app, it shows you a number of online shops where you can quickly jump in to purchase something you want, but you can also [just as] easily establish your own shop from the menu.
Placing pictures of products, changing design, inventory management, etc. – all these tasks can be completed with the smartphone app because we really want to give more people opportunities to build up their own “economic block”.
Base is not trying to be a big e-commerce portal, but a rather platform where people can easily repeat transactions, buying and selling items by leveraging their social connections, and accelerating long-tail businesses.
According to Mr. Tsuruoka, almost 60% of their purchasing traffic comes from mobile devices.
Co-founder Kazuma Ieiri using the app
Of course, all these updates are very likely a direct result of Ieiri’s own philosophies. I asked him how they plan to compete against various competitors, including major e-commerce platforms, shopping cart ASPs, and other similar services. He answered me directly, not hiding his intentions of taking the fight to his competitors:
They are elephants or capybaras [1], but we are mere ants, in contrast. For ants, even if you join forces with capybaras, there’s no way you can defeat elephants. Therefore, you must dig up the ground so that you might trip up the elephants. Understand?
The Base team is expecting to see 500,000 downloads of their iOS app by the end of this month. Let’s stay tuned to see how they do!
The capybara is the largest rodent in the world according to Wikipedia. Editor’s note: Ieiri’s metaphor is a little strange, but it seems capybaras might be a less obscure animal among Japanese people because it is cute, and has been featured in some TV commercials. ↩
What’s big in the world of Japan technology these days? Well, if our Japanese language site is any indication, the following articles represent what our Japanese readers are most interested in over the last 30 days. Read on to find out more! And if you know of a tech story or a startup that’s big in Japan, be sure to let us know about it. 1. Japan loves Ginger Ginger is an personalized proofreader that checks your grammar and spelling, and it’s official launch in Japan was on April 24th. The service comes in the form of a Windows application or a browser extension, and our post about its launch had over 2,000 tweets and 5,000 likes, making it one of our most read articles ever. Read more in Japanese 2. Hero entrepreneurs, Ieiri and Horie Kazuma Ieiri is a serial entrepreneur known for being the youngest founder to go public on the JASDAQ securities exchange. Takafumi Horie is the former president of Livedoor, now a portal website operated by Line Corp. Horie is now on parole after spending 21 months behind bars having been charged with securities fraud (although he still claims innocence). The two are sort of entrepreneurial…
What’s big in the world of Japan technology these days? Well, if our Japanese language site is any indication, the following articles represent what our Japanese readers are most interested in over the last 30 days. Read on to find out more!
And if you know of a tech story or a startup that’s big in Japan, be sure to let us know about it.
1. Japan loves Ginger
Ginger is an personalized proofreader that checks your grammar and spelling, and it’s official launch in Japan was on April 24th. The service comes in the form of a Windows application or a browser extension, and our post about its launch had over 2,000 tweets and 5,000 likes, making it one of our most read articles ever.
Kazuma Ieiri is a serial entrepreneur known for being the youngest founder to go public on the JASDAQ securities exchange. Takafumi Horie is the former president of Livedoor, now a portal website operated by Line Corp. Horie is now on parole after spending 21 months behind bars having been charged with securities fraud (although he still claims innocence). The two are sort of entrepreneurial heroes for the younger generation, and they gave a talk at Ieiri’s book release party where they talked about developing new hardware together.
This post comes via Charlie Custer who responded to Marissa Mayer’s decision that working from home was not the right path for employees at Yahoo. He asserts that startups should allow people to work from home remotely, noting that hiring pro-active people and quantifying work by actual results rather than just hours will yield many benefits.
Moneytree is a newly released app that allows users to manage all their financial assets. You just need to register your bank account and it will automatically show balance and spendings for your different credit cards all in a single page. The startup works out of Shibuya’s co-working space, Co-ba, and its founder is Paul Chapman from Australia.
5. The travel industry is shifting from search to social
As we see change in consumer behavior, the travel industry is shifting accordingly. What is becoming increasingly important is not ‘where’ but ‘who’ – i.e. who among your friends have traveled to a given destination. As a result, the marketing budget for many travel companies is moving from Google to Facebook. The article cites TravelAdvisor as a good example of a company that does social well.
6. If an engineer’s job is to make 0 into 1, a designer’s job is to make 1 into 100
Ikumi Katayama is a user interface designer at Cookpad, a major recipe website in Japan. In this interview she talks about the user interface designing process within the company and how it is all about iterating over and over by testing hypotheses and reading numbers.
This post came out of the recent B Dash Camp 2013 event in Fukuoka. Surprisingly, many up-and-coming education startups came from the social games sector, such as Drecom and Quipper. Social gaming companies says that the features and techniques in social games (like operating events or connecting with friends) can be applied to education services as well.
E-commerce is getting a lot of hype in Japan recently, and Base is one of the more popular services out there, as it allows users to create their own online shop in a matter of minutes. The startups just launched Base Apps, which is a collection of plug-ins that can be added to shops created with Base. So far the app store includes an original domain, SEO, as well as shipping boxes for your merchandise – all for free. The startup plans to release a few plugins per week, attempting to follow Shopify’s monetization model.
Japanese chat application Line added another accomplishment to its growing list on April 8th, briefly nabbing the top spot in the Chinese App Store in the social network category. Line was released in Chinese back in December, needing less than four months to reach this milestone. At the time of the article, it ranked 7th among all free apps.
Another report from the B Dash event in Fukuoka summarized a panel discussing existing problems in the domestic advertising business. Key players from the Japanese online advertising industry talked about the impact of social media on the industry, problems in leveraging personal information in ads, as well as the possibilities of rich media advertisements.
See original story in Japanese. Base is a Tokyo startup that provides an easy-to-implement e-commerce platform. It was born from Project Liverty, a tech savvy team led by serial entrepreneur Kazuma Ieiri. On Friday, the service added a new feature called BASE apps, allowing users to set up a shop under their own domain name. it also includes SEO (search engine optimization), and packaging material that merchants can use when shipping. With the exception of credit card surcharges, the service is provided completely free, and that includes these new features. The company’s CEO Yuta Tsuruoka explains that they will gradually add new features week by week, such as logo design, the ability to offer limited time discounts to customers, and even photo shoots for merchandise. Following Shopify’s successful ‘plug-in strategy’ Base was inspired by Shopify, the third-ranked e-commerce platform behind Amazon and eBay in terms of transaction volume (about $1 billion) in the US. In contrast to competitors, Shopify generates its revenue partially from plug-in usage. Essentially this means that when you add features or services to your e-shop, you will be requested to pay extra. Yuta adds: In the US, many merchants who have their e-shops on multi-tenant e-commerce…
Base is a Tokyo startup that provides an easy-to-implement e-commerce platform. It was born from Project Liverty, a tech savvy team led by serial entrepreneur Kazuma Ieiri. On Friday, the service added a new feature called BASE apps, allowing users to set up a shop under their own domain name. it also includes SEO (search engine optimization), and packaging material that merchants can use when shipping.
With the exception of credit card surcharges, the service is provided completely free, and that includes these new features. The company’s CEO Yuta Tsuruoka explains that they will gradually add new features week by week, such as logo design, the ability to offer limited time discounts to customers, and even photo shoots for merchandise.
Following Shopify’s successful ‘plug-in strategy’
Base was inspired by Shopify, the third-ranked e-commerce platform behind Amazon and eBay in terms of transaction volume (about $1 billion) in the US. In contrast to competitors, Shopify generates its revenue partially from plug-in usage. Essentially this means that when you add features or services to your e-shop, you will be requested to pay extra. Yuta adds:
In the US, many merchants who have their e-shops on multi-tenant e-commerce platforms have [not been doing well], and they are now moving to marketplace platforms. I really want this shift to come to Japan.
The startup’s plug-ins motivate small merchants and even individuals to open shops online. They also provide outsourced logistics service for merchants, and plan to provide vendor-managed inventory services. You can order logo design or a website template from partnering crowdsourced services via the Base platform.
Among the available plug-ins, some allow goods producers to even offer to develop merchandise for you. See apps.thebase.in to learn more about what features they provide.
Monetizing the payment process
Does the Base platform fully drive its business only with these plug-ins? Yuta says the answer is no:
During the testing period, we’ve seen merchants were using our platform in many different ways. Some merchants were selling web services, digital content, or other non-tangible services on the platform. It shows us there’s e-commerce potential far beyond just merchandise distribution. That’s the key for making our business successful, I believe.
He aspires to make this into another Paypal, as opposed to the next Rakuten or Amazon. The Base platform aspires to handle not only merchandise logistics but also monetary transactions between merchants and shoppers which may generate a huge volume of commission.
The e-commerce platform has acquired more than 23,000 merchants in the four months since its launch, where a variety of items ranging from luxury furniture to show tickets are being sold. The average price per customer reaches around 3,500 yen (around $35).
In January, the startup fundraised 23 million yen ($230,000) from Partyfactory, East Ventures, and several angel investors. We’ll keep you updated about how their business further grows from here.
base 
Masaru Ikeda
Takeshi Hirano
Mona Nomura
Yukari Mitsuhashi
