Rakuten CEO Mikitani today explained why his company’s American subsidiary Buy.com has acquired DecisionStep, the company behind ShopTogether, a social shopping tool
None of this information is available in English anywhere, so here we go:
At a press conference in Tokyo, Mikitani said that
- Rakuten plans to strengthen the social shopping experience on Rakuten Ichiba, its online mall (which barely offers any social features at all at the moment)
- one example is to make it possible to chat to other users on your social graph on Rakuten
- he hopes through implementing social elements, buyers will spend more time on Rakuten Ichiba buying products
- buyers should be able to post shopping “experiences” on Rakuten to Twitter and other social media
Mikitani also said that the mobile market is getting increasingly important and that it’s possible that Rakuten acquires mobile app development companies in the future.
As you can see below, the ShopTogether function is already switched on on Buy.com:
