Taobao, China’s online shopping platform, and Yahoo! Japan, said that they will launch cooperative cross-border eCommerce initiatives that will broaden consumer choice and foster small business growth.
Under the new initiatives, Chinese small businesses on Taobao, a subsidiary of Alibaba.com, will be able to offer quality products via e-retail to consumers in Japan, while Japanese merchants on Yahoo! JAPAN Shopping will have access to Chinese consumers.
In addition to offering their respective consumers more choices, Taobao and Yahoo! Japan expect the new offerings to create jobs by helping to increase small business growth through eCommerce and by opening wider markets for goods and services for domestic merchants by facilitating their access to overseas sales.
Taobao-owned TaoJapan, the Chinese-language platform offering Japanese products to Taobao users, and Yahoo! Japan’s China Mall, the Japanese-language platform offering Chinese products to Yahoo! JAPAN shoppers, plan to offer 8 million and 50 million product listings, respectively, at launch on June 1, 2010.
The companies said that the design of new services will allow consumers on Taobao and Yahoo! Japan to buy and sell using systems and procedures that are already familiar to them.
Taobao and Alibaba.com Japan will jointly operate TaoJapan. Taobao will operate the website and Alibaba.com Japan will serve as fulfillment service provider for Yahoo! JAPAN China Mall.
Jack Ma, chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group, said: “We are pleased to help Japanese small businesses sell their products to China on our Taobao platform as we believe more choice is a good thing. As a result of this initiative, our respective customers will eventually be able to choose from millions of products from China and Japan.
“In addition to providing our respective consumers with broader choices, both Alibaba Group and SoftBank also understand the power of e-commerce to change the fortunes of small businesses for the better and that’s why we have decided to create a solution that brings about benefits for both the small businesses and the consumers in China and Japan, and around the world.”
