THE BRIDGE

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Line Mall listed 100,000 items for sale in two weeks, sold 20% of them

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Japanese mobile giant Line Corporation announced today that its recently released Line Mall mobile commerce application has been downloaded 1.2 million times in its first two weeks [1]. There have been 100,000 items made available for sale during that period, in during which Line has decided not to take any commission from sellers here in Japan. The company says that of those items, more than 20,000 have sold. This is a beta period of sorts for Line Mall, which is set to make its official launch later in the year. Line (Japanese) As of March 19.  ↩

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Japanese mobile giant Line Corporation announced today that its recently released Line Mall mobile commerce application has been downloaded 1.2 million times in its first two weeks [1]. There have been 100,000 items made available for sale during that period, in during which Line has decided not to take any commission from sellers here in Japan. The company says that of those items, more than 20,000 have sold.

This is a beta period of sorts for Line Mall, which is set to make its official launch later in the year.

Line (Japanese)


  1. As of March 19.  ↩

Chinese online flower shop forces men to choose their favorite girl

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Based on our previous article, in Japanese China is very good at finding business opportunities among the year’s many holidays. Valentine’s Day on February 14th, and Qixi Festival (often referred to as China’s Valentine’s Day), are both good examples of this. But China has one romantic service that you can use at any time of year, including Valentine’s Day. It’s online flower store RoseOnly, which we previously featured on our Japanese site. The online service began in January of 2013, selling roses for 1000 yuan (about $170), a price point that seems to be targeting the upper class. After a user places an order and enters the recipient’s information, a nice-looking guy delivers the roses in a BMW. Very impressive. But there is one very unique part of this service that stands out. When a male user signs up on the site, he has to register with his national identification card and he cannot specify more than one woman as a recipient – nor can he change the recipient at a later date. So if a man has a relationship with more than one woman, he cannot use the service for both. He would have to make a choice. Even…

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Based on our previous article, in Japanese

China is very good at finding business opportunities among the year’s many holidays. Valentine’s Day on February 14th, and Qixi Festival (often referred to as China’s Valentine’s Day), are both good examples of this. But China has one romantic service that you can use at any time of year, including Valentine’s Day. It’s online flower store RoseOnly, which we previously featured on our Japanese site.

The online service began in January of 2013, selling roses for 1000 yuan (about $170), a price point that seems to be targeting the upper class. After a user places an order and enters the recipient’s information, a nice-looking guy delivers the roses in a BMW. Very impressive.

But there is one very unique part of this service that stands out. When a male user signs up on the site, he has to register with his national identification card and he cannot specify more than one woman as a recipient – nor can he change the recipient at a later date.

So if a man has a relationship with more than one woman, he cannot use the service for both. He would have to make a choice. Even after a user breaks up with his girlfriend, he cannot send RoseOnly roses to a new girlfriend. In a way, that makes them extra special for anyone who receives them.

On Chinese Valentine’s Day, the sales on RoseOnly reached 11 million yuan ($1.8 million). Approximately 11,000 men sent roses using the service. And this success led the company to raise $10 million from Tencent in its series B round, and they opened their first brick-and-mortar stores in September.

The company says that it plans to launch a new service for men to send chocolates to women. I am sure that they are targeting for February 14th with this initiative. For more information, you can check out the RoseOnly promo video below.

Xibao: Helping China’s online merchants advertise better

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CTO of Xibao, Alex Farfurnik, on the right (photo cred) China’s top e-commerce site, Taobao, accounts for a whopping 80% share of the nation’s e-commerce market. But even with so many sellers setting up a shop on Taobao, most of them don’t adequately understand how to sell products on the platform. That’s where Xibao comes in. Xibao’s system helps optimize ads and use Taobao’s ad platform more effectively. According to co-founder, Alex Farfurnik, the company offers three plans at a monthly fixed rate. Pricing starts at 0–100 yuan ($0–17) for a freemium plan, 1000 yuan ($170) for a standard plan, and 15,000 yuan ($2500) for a VIP plan. 17 months have passed since the launch of its ad optimization platform, Super Driver, And the total customers subscribing to paid plans has surpassed 40,000. Advertisement fees paid by Taobao through Xibao have surpassed $150 million. At first, Xibao was launched as a service for small businesses. But the business grew because of a partnership with Taobao, and Xibao began offering the service to major companies as well. XiBao now has partnerships with internet giants like Tencent, Qihoo, JD.com, and Baidu. Generally, sellers place ads on Taobao to lead customers to their…

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CTO of Xibao, Alex Farfurnik, on the right (photo cred)

China’s top e-commerce site, Taobao, accounts for a whopping 80% share of the nation’s e-commerce market. But even with so many sellers setting up a shop on Taobao, most of them don’t adequately understand how to sell products on the platform. That’s where Xibao comes in.

Xibao’s system helps optimize ads and use Taobao’s ad platform more effectively. According to co-founder, Alex Farfurnik, the company offers three plans at a monthly fixed rate. Pricing starts at 0–100 yuan ($0–17) for a freemium plan, 1000 yuan ($170) for a standard plan, and 15,000 yuan ($2500) for a VIP plan. 17 months have passed since the launch of its ad optimization platform, Super Driver, And the total customers subscribing to paid plans has surpassed 40,000. Advertisement fees paid by Taobao through Xibao have surpassed $150 million.

November 11th is widely referred to as ‘E-commerce Day’ on the Chinese internet. This year the sales on Tmall.com, the online retailer spun off from Taobao, reached 35.019 billion yuan ($5.6 billion) for the day. The above picture is from a monitoring room at Tmall.com.

At first, Xibao was launched as a service for small businesses. But the business grew because of a partnership with Taobao, and Xibao began offering the service to major companies as well. XiBao now has partnerships with internet giants like Tencent, Qihoo, JD.com, and Baidu.

Generally, sellers place ads on Taobao to lead customers to their shops. But it turns out that this is not necessarily cost-effective. For example, there was a case when a Tmall seller placed ads on Qihoo, leading viewers to Tmall from there. With this strategy, the cost performance of the ad was 50 times higher than ads placed directly on Tmall. Xibao looks at all the indicators including transactions and advertising ROI to manage the best ad space.

In the upcoming year, Xibao aims to release two apps and acquire 100,000 freemium accounts.

On November 11th, Xibao staff was working overnight at TechTemple. Every year on this day, all the staff work non-stop.

Japan e-commerce startup Monoco partners with major broadcaster Fuji TV

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See the original story in Japanese. Monoco is a flash sales e-commerce site specializing in limited quantity fashions selected by curators and buyers worldwide. The company announced today that it has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Fuji Startup Ventures, the investment arm of Japanese TV network Fuji TV. Coinciding with this funding, the two companies are expecting to work on collaborative product development and explore possible sales opportunities on Fuji TV’s own programs. Furthermore Monoco plans to launch a physical store in Shibuya, Tokyo on September 27th, to be called Monoco Showroom. The company has been seeing good progress of late as well. I spoke with the startup’s CEO Takehiro Kakiyama back in April of last year, when his team has just shifted their gears to become Monoco after its previous efforts under the FlutterScape banner. The team has devoted itself to growth since them, and raising funds (thought to be in the millions of dollars) from Japanese telco KDDI back in July. Monoco now has over 80,000 users, and has partnered with 1,100 product designers Kakiyama didn’t disclose any revenue figures, but he did say that the marketplace now has over 80,000 users, has partnered with 1,100…

mococo

See the original story in Japanese.

Monoco is a flash sales e-commerce site specializing in limited quantity fashions selected by curators and buyers worldwide. The company announced today that it has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Fuji Startup Ventures, the investment arm of Japanese TV network Fuji TV.

Coinciding with this funding, the two companies are expecting to work on collaborative product development and explore possible sales opportunities on Fuji TV’s own programs. Furthermore Monoco plans to launch a physical store in Shibuya, Tokyo on September 27th, to be called Monoco Showroom.

The company has been seeing good progress of late as well. I spoke with the startup’s CEO Takehiro Kakiyama back in April of last year, when his team has just shifted their gears to become Monoco after its previous efforts under the FlutterScape banner. The team has devoted itself to growth since them, and raising funds (thought to be in the millions of dollars) from Japanese telco KDDI back in July.

Monoco now has over 80,000 users, and has partnered with 1,100 product designers

Kakiyama didn’t disclose any revenue figures, but he did say that the marketplace now has over 80,000 users, has partnered with 1,100 product designers (both in Japan and around the world), and has over 50,000 items available on the platform.

Their headcount has reached 22, way up from five when the service was launched.

It will be interesting to see how Monoco will compete in this space now that it has the support of this Japanese media giant.

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Union Wood Wallet
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Yaci Ring

Can a small Japanese startup ride the smartphone wave to e-commerce success?

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See the original story in Japanese. Thanks to the progress that companies like Rakuten and Amazon have made in the e-commerce market, we can now easily purchase quality items for better prices online. But in Japan, the online retail market still accounts for less than 10% of the nation’s overall retail market, which means there’s still lots of potential for further growth. One player out there is hoping to disrupt the Japanese market from a unique angle. Coach United is the Tokyo-based startup behind Cyta.jp, one of Japan’s leading marketplaces focused on private lessons. According to CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu, their newly launched smartphone-optimized interface will be a turning point for the company, capitalizing on Japan’s increasing affinity for all things mobile. They plan to create a new kind of business where instead of selling just products online, they focus on ‘service e-commerce’. Cyta.jp provides users with information about 140 different private lessons (such as language learning, music study, or qualification acquisition) which are available at 3,000 locations around the country. Unlike other marketplace services which typically connect potential students to lesson teachers, the startup assures the quality of the lessons they introduce on the website by checking into who will…

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Coach United’s CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu

See the original story in Japanese.

Thanks to the progress that companies like Rakuten and Amazon have made in the e-commerce market, we can now easily purchase quality items for better prices online. But in Japan, the online retail market still accounts for less than 10% of the nation’s overall retail market, which means there’s still lots of potential for further growth.

One player out there is hoping to disrupt the Japanese market from a unique angle. Coach United is the Tokyo-based startup behind Cyta.jp, one of Japan’s leading marketplaces focused on private lessons. According to CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu, their newly launched smartphone-optimized interface will be a turning point for the company, capitalizing on Japan’s increasing affinity for all things mobile. They plan to create a new kind of business where instead of selling just products online, they focus on ‘service e-commerce’.

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Cyta.jp provides users with information about 140 different private lessons (such as language learning, music study, or qualification acquisition) which are available at 3,000 locations around the country. Unlike other marketplace services which typically connect potential students to lesson teachers, the startup assures the quality of the lessons they introduce on the website by checking into who will teach or where it will take place. Since launching back in June of 2011, have served a total of about 20,000 users.

Shifting to Smartphones

Ariyasu explained the recent shift in their users’ preferences.

Smartphone access is rapidly increasing. It used to account for just 10% of all access, but it reached 45% back in June and has now surpassed desktop access.

Cyta.jp access statistics by browsing device (June 2012 - June 2013)
Cyta.jp access statistics by browsing device (June 2011 – June 2013)

As we reported several times before, smartphone access is increasing across many Japanese web services. Mr. Ariyasu believes in this trend, and is going to adjust his service accordingly.

We learned that people use smartphones during commutes and at home. Over the last two months, we’ve been focusing on developing a smartphone-optimized interface in order to provide [all] available features to smartphone users.

The startup isn’t selling physical products on side, but rather lessons in the form of a service. It requires a business strategy different from that of conventional online retailers. The company expects to standardize its strategy and expand business to other local community-based services. He adds:

We plan to allow users to book a local service using our website and consume it offline. These services include things like baby sitting, waterworks repair, and even decorative nail painting. Major e-commerce sites such as Rakuten or Amazon will not be able to sell these services online. But we believe consumers will want to buy them online.

This concept is somewhat similar to the group-buying service trends initiated by Groupon. It’s relatively easy to build a system that allows users to discover and find a service they may be interested in. However, in order to encouraging consumers to buy the service and give them a positive user experience, it probably requires a little more know-how. In fact, with group-buying services there have been difficulties in terms of how participating retailers delivered their services, often resulting in poor service quality.

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Cyta.jp has been trying to ensure quality by interviewing lesson teachers prior to hiring, or carrying out surprise inspections of lessons via ‘mystery shoppers’ (so to speak). It is through this extra effort that the company plans to be a leader in the service e-commerce industry.

Personally I was a little unsure if this quality assurance policy could co-exist with business scalability. But Ariyasu explained:

I don’t think a costly business is unscalable, it’s a bit of a misconception. In fact, group-buying businesses were using a bunch of people for sales, but their business were successfully scaled. Whether or not your business is scalable depends on the whether you can be persistently profitable, so you can receive funds and invest in the business to scale up when needed.

It will be interesting to see what kind of an impact Cyta can make. And it will be perhaps even more interesting to see if many other young startups follow in this sort of service e-commerce in the future.

Ready? Fight! A summary of 6 fierce Japanese startup rivalries

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See the original Japanese version of this article If you’re a web startup, chances are you probably have a competitor or two. Maybe more. Here in Japan we are seeing rivals emerge in a number of service categories. Thankfully, with each struggling to stand out from the other, it means that users are most likely to benefit, at least in the short term. I will talk about the major players across six startup categories that have been getting attention here in Japan. Round 1: Stores.jp vs BASE (E-commerce platforms) ¶ I almost wanted to write about just this competition by itself, since both services have experienced rapid growth and the quality of their services is increasing by the day. This is a great example of how intense competition brings better quality product. See STORES.jp in our database See BASE in our database Base: The Japanese freemium e-commerce platform that’s following Shopify’s lead How Stores.jp is helping small businesses in Japan come online Round 2: iQON vs Origami vs MONOCO vs Fril (Smartphone x Fashion) ¶ iQON is media, Origami is commerce, Monoco is a concierge service, and Fril is C2C. Those startups all differ slightly but they share two common…

See the original Japanese version of this article

If you’re a web startup, chances are you probably have a competitor or two. Maybe more. Here in Japan we are seeing rivals emerge in a number of service categories. Thankfully, with each struggling to stand out from the other, it means that users are most likely to benefit, at least in the short term.

I will talk about the major players across six startup categories that have been getting attention here in Japan.

Round 1: Stores.jp vs BASE (E-commerce platforms)

I almost wanted to write about just this competition by itself, since both services have experienced rapid growth and the quality of their services is increasing by the day. This is a great example of how intense competition brings better quality product.

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Round 2: iQON vs Origami vs MONOCO vs Fril (Smartphone x Fashion)

iQON is media, Origami is commerce, Monoco is a concierge service, and Fril is C2C. Those startups all differ slightly but they share two common threads: ‘fashion’ and ‘smartphones’. All have maintained high levels of investor interest. And it is said that this field is about to face a host of new entrants, resulting in even more hype around this space.

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Round 3: CrowdWorks vs Lancers (Crowdsourcing)

The platform concept of these two services differs slightly. However, I feel both have the potential to change the concept of the way people work here in Japan, and that’s what differentiates them from other worker-client matching services.

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Round 4: Coiney vs Rakuten Smartpay vs Paypal

Competition this category is a little more fierce as the players are not all startups. But when I interviewed Coiney I felt that their strategy is not to compete head on with these other payment giants. Check out interview (in Japanese) for more details.

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Round 5: Campfire vs Readyfor vs Countdown (Crowdfunding)

Campfire has gotten a lot of attention so far, but it hasn’t yet resulted in the same kind of impact that we have seen with big overseas players. The first out of the gate in this crowdfunding space was Readyfor, which has differentiated by focusing on social contributions, donations, and NPOs. A critical success factor will be its ability to generate news media exposure.

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Round 6: SmartNews vs Gunosy vs Vingow (News technology)

This field is pretty interesting because the competition depends on technology much more so than in the previously mentioned categories. SmartNews shows its users almost all the same news information, which is different from the other two players. The concept of personalized news is common to Gunosy and Vingow. But Vingow offers users updated information in real-time, different from Gunosy which updates information in batches. Many users might use both services, depending on the occasion.

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I confess, I also wanted to include C2C platforms in this article (such as ticket selling, for example), but I’ll come back to that another time.

Besides those listed above, Japan also has an abundance of camera applications and casual games, but many lack monetization plans and solid business models – so they are less news-worthy in my book. Most of the services listed above have established business models and firm financials, and of course that is a big attraction for investors.

If you’d like to suggest some other hot startup categories or rivalry, please let me know in the comments.

Kakaku.com: Japan’s price comparison king

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This is part of our ‘Japanese internet in-depth’ series (RSS). Stay tuned for more features that aim to explain what makes the internet unique in Japan. Japanese price comparison site Kakaku.com is a pretty essential tool for shoppers in Japan, whether you do your shopping online or offline. While sites like Rakuten or Amazon Japan are among the most likely online retail destinations, along with countless other lesser known e-commerce options. But in order to find out where the cheapest option is, Kakaku is your spot. From a business perspective, Kakaku.com essentially offers both price comparison listing (for which it charges a fee) and free product listing/aggregation. But from a consumer perspective, what I find to be Kakaku’s best feature is its categorized product ranking. While this is a somewhat common features among product-centered sites these days, Kakaku executes it well, essentially removing any of the worry you might have that you’ll buy the wrong product. If it’s the top product or an editor’s choice than it’s pretty safe bet that you’ve made a good selection [1]. Kakaku has a decent mobile site too, so I find myself checking on prices even while in stores sometimes. The company does offer…

kakaku-logo

This is part of our ‘Japanese internet in-depth’ series (RSS). Stay tuned for more features that aim to explain what makes the internet unique in Japan.


Japanese price comparison site Kakaku.com is a pretty essential tool for shoppers in Japan, whether you do your shopping online or offline. While sites like Rakuten or Amazon Japan are among the most likely online retail destinations, along with countless other lesser known e-commerce options. But in order to find out where the cheapest option is, Kakaku is your spot. From a business perspective, Kakaku.com essentially offers both price comparison listing (for which it charges a fee) and free product listing/aggregation.

But from a consumer perspective, what I find to be Kakaku’s best feature is its categorized product ranking. While this is a somewhat common features among product-centered sites these days, Kakaku executes it well, essentially removing any of the worry you might have that you’ll buy the wrong product. If it’s the top product or an editor’s choice than it’s pretty safe bet that you’ve made a good selection [1]. Kakaku has a decent mobile site too, so I find myself checking on prices even while in stores sometimes. The company does offer a bar code search app, although I have yet to give that a try.

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Photo: Gigazine

The other useful feature of Kakaku is that it shows you recent price fluctuations via a line chart that shows both lowest and average price over time. So if you have a big purchase planned this is something you might keep your eye on, to make sure you’re buying at the right time. There are even some apps out there that will send you an alert when the price falls below a certain threshold.

Another major use of Kakaku is its kuchikomi user reviews. This is where users provide feedback about various products, giving you a little more insight into products you’d like to buy. To get a better idea about Kakaku’s web interface, check out this video overview that I made a little while back [2].

The company has a pretty extensive repertoire of Facebook pages which really help if you’d like to stay up to date on new products in a certain category. For example, I like to keep an eye on new cameras that hit the market, and Kakaku’s camera page is great for this.

Kakaku also has a number of interesting subsidiaries that you might be familiar with, including food-focused site Tabelog, Japanese movie information site eiga.com as well as travel-focused price comparison site 4travel.jp.

Interestingly Kakaku has been looking to offer its price comparison service in foreign markets, with sites already established and operating in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines under the PricePrice.com umbrella. It will be interesting to see which markets the company looks to next.

Also relevant in the price comparison space is Aucfan which helps consumers find the best available prices on online auction sites.


  1. For example, I just bought a bathroom scales yesterday. What do I know about which is the best bathroom scales? Absolutely nothing. But by going with the top ranked scales on Kakaku I know I got decent value.  ↩

  2. While this video is a little dated by now, it still serves as a good illustration since the website hasn’t changed too much.  ↩

Japan’s Netprice.com invests in Turkey’s largest price comparison site Akakce.com

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Japanese e-commerce and incubation company Netprice.com announced today that it has invested in Turkey’s largest price comparison site Akakce.com, establishing a strategic partnership at the same time. Detailed figures about the investment were not disclosed. According Netprice, this will be the first investment by a Japanese company into a Turkish e-commerce business. Update: According to turk.internet.com, Netprice.com took a 20% stake in Akakce.com. Akakce.com was founded in 2000 in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey, provides the nation’s consumers with prices and user opinions about a variety of products such as home appliances, health care products, and gaming products. Turkey’s population is around 75 million, and about 47% of them have access to the Internet [1]. The country has huge potential for e-commerce because payment and logistics infrastructure are already sufficient. Akakace.com has more than 4 million monthly unique visitors. Through this partnership, Netprice.com aspires to learn more about the Turkish e-commerce market, and plans to help the community grow by incubating local startups. Since Turkish entrepreneur Bora Savas joined the investment team at NetPrice.com back in January, I assume he involved in this investment — likely an important link in helping the Japanese company connect with the Turkish startup community….

akakceJapanese e-commerce and incubation company Netprice.com announced today that it has invested in Turkey’s largest price comparison site Akakce.com, establishing a strategic partnership at the same time. Detailed figures about the investment were not disclosed. According Netprice, this will be the first investment by a Japanese company into a Turkish e-commerce business.

Update: According to turk.internet.com, Netprice.com took a 20% stake in Akakce.com.

Akakce.com was founded in 2000 in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey, provides the nation’s consumers with prices and user opinions about a variety of products such as home appliances, health care products, and gaming products.

Turkey’s population is around 75 million, and about 47% of them have access to the Internet [1]. The country has huge potential for e-commerce because payment and logistics infrastructure are already sufficient.

Akakace.com has more than 4 million monthly unique visitors. Through this partnership, Netprice.com aspires to learn more about the Turkish e-commerce market, and plans to help the community grow by incubating local startups.

Since Turkish entrepreneur Bora Savas joined the investment team at NetPrice.com back in January, I assume he involved in this investment — likely an important link in helping the Japanese company connect with the Turkish startup community.

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  1. This is based on surveys from Eurostat and Turkstat.  ↩

Base: The Japanese freemium e-commerce platform that’s following Shopify’s lead

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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…

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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 platforms have [not been doing well], and they are now moving to marketplace platforms. I really want this shift to come to Japan.

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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.

How Stores.jp is helping small businesses in Japan come online

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While it is unlikely that we’ll see an ecommerce competitor as huge as Rakuten in the near future, there is still much room to grow in the online commerce sector, especially for small businesses. According to research by Japanese Ministry of Economy, the portion of of the country’s retail industry who are online is only 2.8%. That means that 97.2% of all retail businesses in Japan limit themselves to selling things offline. Of this 97.2%, the overwhelming majority are very small business run by only a few people with presumably limited internet skills. Stores.jp is aimed at these small businesses, allowing them to create online stores in a matter of minutes. It’s the equivalent of services like Yokaboo or Flying Cart. The company behind Stores.jp, Bracket, also runs other services such as Shoes of Prey, an online custom shoes service (headquartered in Australia), and a C2C car sharing site called Cafore. Shoes of Prey promises satisfaction guaranteed, allowing users to return their custom designed shoes if they are not 100% happy with them. To sell off these returned shoes, the company tried using services like Stores.jp, but found them too confusing to use with too many features. So they decided…

stores.jp-logo

While it is unlikely that we’ll see an ecommerce competitor as huge as Rakuten in the near future, there is still much room to grow in the online commerce sector, especially for small businesses. According to research by Japanese Ministry of Economy, the portion of of the country’s retail industry who are online is only 2.8%. That means that 97.2% of all retail businesses in Japan limit themselves to selling things offline. Of this 97.2%, the overwhelming majority are very small business run by only a few people with presumably limited internet skills.

Stores.jp is aimed at these small businesses, allowing them to create online stores in a matter of minutes. It’s the equivalent of services like Yokaboo or Flying Cart. The company behind Stores.jp, Bracket, also runs other services such as Shoes of Prey, an online custom shoes service (headquartered in Australia), and a C2C car sharing site called Cafore. Shoes of Prey promises satisfaction guaranteed, allowing users to return their custom designed shoes if they are not 100% happy with them. To sell off these returned shoes, the company tried using services like Stores.jp, but found them too confusing to use with too many features. So they decided to build a more simplified version, and that resulted in Stores.jp.

To use the site, no coding or HTML skills are required. To create your store, all you need is your email and password. After registration, just upload photos, names, and descriptions of your products and your online store is completed. When orders come in, you send out the product and the money will be paid to your designated bank account. Stores.jp follows a freemium model where up to five items per month can be sold with zero cost. For sellers with more items to sell, the monthly cost is 980 yen (about $10) with an additional payment system usage fee of 5%. For premium accounts, the site offers marketing and log analysis features as well.

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Stores.jp was released in August of last year, and so far over 25,000 stores have been opened on the site. According to Bracket CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto, the total number of stores on Rakuten is 40,000. The number of items registered exceeds 70,000 and it currently has more than 500,000 monthly users.

But Stores.jp is not without competitors. Three months after its release, an almost identical site called Base was released and had over 7,000 stores within three weeks. In an effort to stay ahead of the competition, Stores.jp offers additional services including professional photography and the creation of store business cards. Both options are provided free, with photography available for maximum of twenty items.

Merchants on the site are mainly small businesses but there are also well-known chains like Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and a famous magazine called Tokyo Calendar. These bigger companies use the site to create online shops dedicated for a particular campaign or content. For example, Tokyo Calendar opened a Japanese sake shop for its sake issue.

To find out more about how the Stores.jp works, check out the video below.