Rakuten are fulfilling their aim to open a UK and German site this year with the acquisition of Tradoria in Germany. They have acquired an 80% stake in Tradoria which was was founded in 2007 and employs a unique business model that encompasses a web store, marketplace and checkout in a single product for small and medium-sized merchants.
The acquisition comes one year after Rakuten took its first step into continental Europe with the acquisition of PriceMinister in France and sets the stage for continued expansion across Europe.
The German e-commerce market is expected to grow 12% in 2011 and with 61 million online consumers, Germany has the biggest online population in Europe, 13 million more than the UK.
Next stop for Rakuten will be the UK… which platform will they purchase? Is eBid a contender or are Rakuten only interested in platforms which are generating significant sales? Tradoria has over 4,400 shops offer approximately 8 million products so there’s a chance Rakuten might choose to expand Tradoria or Priceminister to the UK or build a brand new site in preference to buying an existing UK marketplace.
10 Responses
I think eBid is not working well because it lacks direction. If Rakuten are a company that knows what they are doing, they will easily turn eBid around. I’m begining to be getting traffic from the far east on my website, so it will be interesting if Rakuten have their own payment gateway or if they will make if available to websites in the UK as I would like to convert this traffic into sales.
eBid are pretty hopeless, I signed-up for lifetime membership about a month ago and managed to make one sale… that’s one sale.
I have since restructed my website so that you can “buy-it-now” via links to eBid and that seems a lot better…
For the stuff that I have no idea what it’s worth (that’s the beauty of collectables), my website directs people to eBay to have a bid and that’s okay too.
I suppose eBid have improved but they really need to get their pages up the Google listings and do some proper marketing.
I never got the T-shirt.
There are sites in some countries that are far superior to the the amount of traffic they get , when compared with Ebay .
In New Zealand , the sited called ” Trade Me ” is rated number 5 while Ebay in New Zealand is only rated 27 in the amount of traffic it receives.
Ebay has never been able to successfully compete on the same level as Trade Me in New Zealand .
” Trade Me ” is a very successful site and anyone interested in how a website should look when competing with eBay , should take a good look at this site .
Also the owners of the site spend nothing on promotions when compared to the amount Ebay spent on Google to attract traffic .
Trade Me was bought by the Fairfax Press Australia awhile ago for a high price , I am hoping that Fairfax does bring Trade Me to Australia because Ebay does need good competition so sellers get a good deal with added competition .
Aside from the lack of traffic I always thought one ebid’s biggest errors was not owning the domain name ebid.com. It currently directs to something that has nothing to do with ebid.