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Japan’s Stores.jp partners with major e-commerce portals to help merchants find traffic

Takeshi Hirano Takeshi Hirano
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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…

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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.

myfave_screenshot

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.

Related news

  1. Japan’s Stores.jp partners with department store chain to bring its retailers online
  2. storesjp-panoplaza Japanese shop builder Stores.jp partners with Panoplaza for 360-degree e-commerce
  3. Japanese fashion commerce giant Zozotown acquires DIY shop startup Stores.jp

Former Zynga Japan GM launches ambitious new flea market app

Takeshi Hirano Takeshi Hirano
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See also the original story in Japanese. Shintaro Yamada is a Japanese entrepreneur who previously sold his startup Unoh to Zynga back in August of 2010. The company subsequently became Zynga Japan, and he was named general manager. But in January of 2012, he suddenly quit and started traveling around the world. He returned from his travels this past February, and has now founded a new startup called Kouzoh. The idea has finally been unveiled to the public, a mobile flea market app for Android called Mercari. The app allows you to take a picture of what you want to sell, and publish it to the marketplace. The buy and sell process happens entirely on your smartphone, and the successful bid is payable via credit card, bank teller, or even at a convenience store counter. An iOS app will be live in a few weeks, we’re told. The service takes a 10% commission for selling your item. And in order to prevent possible user disputes over money transfers, the startup stands in middle of every single trade between a buyer and a seller. In this space, we’ve already seen many flea market apps like Fril, Pashaoku, and Listor. Shintaro explained…

mercari_logoSee also the original story in Japanese.

Shintaro Yamada is a Japanese entrepreneur who previously sold his startup Unoh to Zynga back in August of 2010. The company subsequently became Zynga Japan, and he was named general manager. But in January of 2012, he suddenly quit and started traveling around the world. He returned from his travels this past February, and has now founded a new startup called Kouzoh. The idea has finally been unveiled to the public, a mobile flea market app for Android called Mercari.

The app allows you to take a picture of what you want to sell, and publish it to the marketplace. The buy and sell process happens entirely on your smartphone, and the successful bid is payable via credit card, bank teller, or even at a convenience store counter. An iOS app will be live in a few weeks, we’re told.

mercari_screenshots

The service takes a 10% commission for selling your item. And in order to prevent possible user disputes over money transfers, the startup stands in middle of every single trade between a buyer and a seller.

shintaro_yamada
Kouzoh’s Shintaro Yamada

In this space, we’ve already seen many flea market apps like Fril, Pashaoku, and Listor. Shintaro explained how he expects to differentiate this from existing competitors:

For now, there’s no dominant player in this space. We’d like to present our app as a place where users can buy and sell things with their smartphones safely. We still have many things to do from now, but we have an awesome team, so please stay tuned.

They have not yet set any specific target revenue volume, but the company aspires to transact a total in the range of 50 billion yen to 600 billion yen ($500 million to $6 billion).

But why would Yamada operate a mobile marketplace following his previous experience in the gaming business? He explained that nothing has been changed in terms of his strategy:

My interest is C2C (consumer-consumer) business in a broad sense. It’s one of the leaps that the internet has enabled. I really want to make something innovative in this space. Our company’s mission is to make internet services widely used in the world, and that’s the same goal as my previous company Unoh. It was mobile gaming at that time, but now we’re focusing on a flea market app.

Yamada was born in 1977, and he’s seen as a new-generation serial entrepreneur in Japan, as well as an angel investor. We will keep our eyes on how he progresses from here.

Related news

  1. Japanese mobile flea market app Mercari raises $14 million, will expand to US market
  2. Japanese flea market app secures investment of $3M just 6 weeks after launch
  3. Japanese flea market app Mercari raises $500,000 from East Ventures

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