Rakuten launches in the UK

Monday, October 27, 2014 - 13:18 by Sarah Collinson

Rakuten is Japan’s largest purveyor of safe shopping online and, this month, it has officially launched its first own-brand e-commerce site in the UK, according to the Financial Times.

Rakuten.co.uk is designed to allow third party retailers to sell their wares to consumers from across the country, rather than having to rely on their own online stores. In fact, Rakuten initially took over now-defunct British e-commerce site, Play.com, before closing it down ahead of launching its own outlet.

This new arrival on the market is essentially a direct competitor to established equivalents, including eBay and Amazon’s own marketplace service, with the intention being that it will expand to support a wide number of merchants both based in the UK and further afield.

Because Rakuten has international reach, customers should soon be able to purchase products not only from sellers based in Great Britain, but from any of the company’s marketplaces around the world. And the ability to carry out cross-border transactions via safe shopping online will certainly be a selling point of the site, once this is up and running.

Like Amazon, Rakuten not only offers e-commerce services but also has a hand in other areas, such as eBook readers. Its own Kobo line of devices comes with access to a digital download service and the company is looking to unify user accounts across all of the platforms that it operates in the UK, making it easier for customers to manage everything they use.

It will be interesting to see how Rakuten.co.uk fares in the UK’s mature e-commerce market. Consumers here are well aware of how to use the web to buy and sell items already, so this Japanese firm will need to bring something seriously fresh to the table to attract the attention of Brits.