News/blog.

Each of the two companies will have a new section on its site, allowing for product listings from the other. This allows Taobao access to eight million Japanese products and Yahoo! Japan 50 million Chinese products as of the first of next month.

The aim is to allow small business owners to carry out transactions in a wider market. At the press conference announcing the deal, Yahoo! Japan’s chairman, Masayoshi Son, said that this would allow the two companies to beat eBay to become the largest marketplace online.

Taobao has plans to expand further with the deal with Yahoo! Japan being only the first part of a concerted bid to reach countries further afield.

The deal will also lead the two into conflict with China’s main search engine, Baidu, which recently inked a deal with a Japanese company, Rakuten, to set up an online shopping outlet targeting China. The competition between these two ventures is only likely to get more fierce as time goes on.

original article here

Reader comments (0)

Add a comment