Yahoo Japan’s E-Commerce Revolution: No Fees Model

Yahoo Japan announced today at their Store Conference 2013 that they would remove fees from Yahoo Shopping and Yahoo Auctions services. According to the announcement, they are hoping to increase the number of merchants and the available products sold and offered through its services by removing the obstacles = fees. With this huge change in their service model, they aim to become the largest E-Commerce site in Japan by 2019.

“By removing the fees, we want to make the coefficient of friction of the EC to zero, to create an open environment without any restrictions, which is how the Internet should be.” stated Mr. Son, Presidnet of Softbank, who is also a chaiman of Yahoo Japan.

In addition to removing the fees related to their EC services such as the merchant fee and the loyalty fees, they’ll allow individual sellers to have a merchant space on their shopping site as well as offering the products to the auctions without a fee.  They’ll also make its service more flexible by opening the links to external websites, and by removing the restrictions for the newsletters sent by merchants to their customers.

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Motoko Hunt

President & Search Marketing Strategist at AJPR

Motoko Hunt manages the SEO for all of Adobe's properties in Japan and the APAC region. Prior to joining Adobe, Motoko established AJPR in 1998; she has been providing search marketing consulting services targeting Japan and Asia to companies around the world. Her services have made a big impact on the search marketing campaigns of some of the world's most popular multi-national brands. A number of her articles have been published on industry websites and printed media including MultiLingual Computing and the International Journal of Localisation. She also writes about the Japanese online market on her blog at AJPR and contributes to several online magazines in Japan and Asia. She served as a member of the board of directors of SEMPO in 2010-2012, and is a chairperson of the SEMPO Asia-Pacific Committee.

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