Asia

Smarter.com.cn and Smarter.co.jp

Very cool to see Smarter launching so soon in both China and Japan. From what I can tell, the Chinese site is more sophisticated than the Japanese site. Or rather, the Japanese site looks more focused on categories like apparel and beauty, instead of attribute-oriented categories like computers and electronics. Both of them look to be filling out quickly, as evidenced by their Google page counts:

site:smarter.co.jp = 211,000
site:smarter.com.cn = 81,300

In particular, the Chinese site seems to be gaining traction:

(RSS readers: click here to see the Alexa graph)

OT: I'm in the early stages of trying to learn the Japanese language, maybe all these comparison shopping engines -- old, new and future -- will serve as interesting learning resources.

Smarter.com.cn and Smarter.co.jp
Posted by Sean O'Rourke on December 12, 2005 at 1:11 PM
Archived at Asia | China | Japan | Smarter.com

Yahoo-Kimo offers comparison shopping for Taiwan

"Yahoo-Kimo, Taiwan's largest Internet portal, announced yesterday that they have launched a comparison shopping portal that will assist online shoppers in comparing different products before they make their choices."

more details: chinapost.com

Yahoo-Kimo offers comparison shopping for Taiwan
Posted by Sean O'Rourke on October 6, 2005 at 9:53 PM
Archived at Asia

Become Japan

via SiliconBeat, Become.com expands overseas:

"Become Japan will launch sometime before the end of the year. Yang says the goal is to take Become Japan public in Japan."

check the full post for details...

Become Japan
Posted by Sean O'Rourke on October 4, 2005 at 2:54 PM
Archived at Asia | Become.com | Japan

Kakaku.com: Japanese Comparison Shopping Engine... Wow!

How did it take me so long to find such a large comparison shopping site? I am shamed...

Stats as of February 2005:
6.16 million unique users
302 million page views
http://www.kakaku.com/

NOTE: There is more corporate information on this page in English.

Now for "WOW"...

This is a site that clearly does not have to worry about limitations such as small monitors or low bandwidth. Not only that, they have a triple-sort option (translate: Babelfish or Google) on their attribute-based search pages. Nice!

+ + +

In related news, due to an unexpected wave of new opportunities, I will not have time to attend the Tokyo "Search Engine Strategies" conference in April. Hopefully, I'll have better luck next time.

Kakaku.com: Japanese Comparison Shopping Engine... Wow!
Posted by Sean O'Rourke on March 31, 2005 at 7:59 PM
Archived at Asia | Japan

Shopping Search Week 2004 at Search Engine Watch (4 of 4)

Day #4 - summaries of United Kingdom, Australia and Hong Kong.

Shopping Search Week 2004 at Search Engine Watch (4 of 4)
Posted by Sean O'Rourke on January 2, 2005 at 6:14 PM
Archived at Asia | Australia | Regional Shopping Engines | United Kingdom