Japan

Japanese Comparison Shopping Blog

This Japanese blog (http://blog.livedoor.jp/kakaku_hikaku/) looks like one of the earliest comparison shopping blogs, launched more than a week before yours truly. The "Kakaku Hikaku" in the URL works out to "Price Comparison" I think. It might be a long time until I am able to work out anything else (see: fumblingtowardsjapanese.com), but luckily their last post is in the international language of traffic rankings, with a dozen or so shopping resources grouped by ranking proximity into three big Alexa charts.

Japanese Comparison Shopping Blog (1)
Posted by Sean O'Rourke on December 23, 2005 at 1:48 PM
Archived at Japan

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

Rakuten and NTT DoCoMo in strategic allience

I don't have any special insights here, but word on the street is that internet auction allience between Rakuten and NTT DoCoMo could be interesting... archiving it here for possible follow-up...

Rakuten and NTT DoCoMo in strategic allience (2)
Posted by Sean O'Rourke on October 12, 2005 at 5:40 PM
Archived at Japan

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