The largest such site in the world

Jun 1, 2010 14:07 GMT  ·  By

Yahoo Japan and Chinese e-commerce giant Taobao have joined forces to launch a new service catering to customers in both countries. Japanese customers will be able to buy products from Chinese companies and the other way around. The two companies say this new service will become the largest e-commerce hub in the world, dwarfing the popular US-based eBay.

The joint effort gets underway today with the launch of the Yahoo Japan China Mall, where Japanese customers can purchase products from small Chinese businesses. The corresponding site for Chinese customers is TaoJapan. Both sites are designed for their local audience and are translated into either Japanese or Chinese, depending on the case. Yahoo Japan’s China Mall will hold some tens of millions of products at launch, while TaoJapan will have about eight million.

The product descriptions are also translated to enable potential customers to know what they are actually buying. This has been one of the major hurdles facing cross-border online commerce. Product descriptions and most of the dynamic content will likely be made available through machine translation. This, along with a lot less red tape when buying a product from the neighboring country, is expected to spur cross-border transactions.

The combined marketplace will cater to some 250 million customers and eventually offer 450 million products for sale. The move enables Softbank to secure another foothold in the fast-growing Chinese Internet market.

Taobao is the largest Chinese e-commerce site. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Alibaba Group, one of the biggest companies on the Chinese web. Yahoo owns a 40-percent stake in the Alibaba Group that also runs Yahoo’s operations in China. Japan’s Softbank, the biggest web company in that country, controls a 33-percent stake in Alibaba Group. Softbank also owns an almost 39-percent stake in Yahoo Japan and is the largest share holder. Yahoo owns about 35 percent of Yahoo Japan.