By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Rakuten today announced that its US company Buy.com (acquired in May last year) launched a special site that makes it possible for the 2,500 merchants registered on Buy.com to ship goods to Japanese customers. Users with a Rakuten ID can buy products on Buy.com, from the US, using the same ID as in...
It took a while, but Rakuten finally released an iPhone app (for Rakuten Ichiba, its online mall) yesterday. It’s available for free in the Japanese App Store and makes it easier for iPhone users to browse through the 70 million items currently listed in Rakuten Ichiba. It’s a good...
Will Cookpad win or Rakuten Recipe? Japanese A-list blogger Akky Akimoto has written an article worth reading on how Japan’s biggest sites for recipes are battling it out currently. It looks like Rakuten Recipe is on its way to overtake Cookpad, a company that’s listed at the Tokyo...
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 announced they inked a deal with Disney Japan to set up a special online shop on Rakuten Ichiba. The so-called Disney Store will offer Disney-related goods to the site’s 70 million members. For Disney, Japan is one of the world’s biggest markets. The company operates 47 brick...
Rakuten keeps hiring employees from China to drive its internationalization efforts, even though overall numbers are still low. Japan’s biggest e-commerce company added five Chinese students in fiscal 2009, another 15 more in 2010, and aims at adding an additional 15 this year. Most of...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry