In the Hutong
I mean, it's a holiday, right?
1127 hrs.
In his interview with Ratuken chairman and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani, Geoffrey Fowler of the Wall Street Journal touches on how cultural differences have taken an Internet business down a much different path than its U.S. counterparts:
WSJ: What makes your approach to the Japanese market different from the approach Amazon and eBay have taken here in the U.S.?
Mr. Mikitani: The merchant—meaning the "shop operator" or "shop master"—is very important for us. We allow our merchants to own a store in a mall.
For example, the Amazon marketplace doesn't allow the merchants the ability to interact with the end customer. In the U.S. with Amazon, the business goes merchant, Amazon and then user. We go Rakuten, merchant and then end user.
Sometimes it's a little bit noisy for some people. Some people might like the more straightforward Wal-Mart type—the big general store. We are like the marketplace in Europe and Japan with many, many stores. They are live and edit every day and want to communicate with their customer.
We believe that comparison shopping and convenience is important. But if you just keep competing on price, nobody is going to win.
Mikitani doesn't suggest at any point that Ratuken's approach is somehow superior to Amazon's or to eBay's. To do so would have been decidely un-Japanese.
Yet the first two-thirds of the interview provoke thought. Shopping may be a nearly universal activity, but no shopping experience can be a one-size-fits-all proposition. The way we each prefer to respond to our inner hunter-gatherer varies by culture, person, and sometimes by the merchandise we seek.
All of which underscores that one of the reasons for e-commerce's more modest initial success in China was that the prototypical Amazon/Wal-Mart/eBay experience was lacking one or more ingredients important for China's shoppers. Despite the success of Taobao and Joyo, I think the industry is getting closer, but it is not quite there yet.
It will be interesting to watch the Baidu-Ratuken tie-up. Will they get closer to the winning formula?
This a really on-point. I've been watching Chinese shop for real estate, green tech deals, and other souvenirs in the USA. Which keeps reminding me of lessons I learned working the retail sector in China.
Decision making behavior is cultural, and the biggest part of a purchase decision is, in whom or what do we trust? Some sweeping generalizations for purposes of illustration:
Americans put their trust in the retail format: the big box with the big selection and anonymous service. It's not about buying a Panasonic, it's about going to Best Buy to look for a TV.
In functional - not prestige goods - Chinese counterbalance brand preference with analysis of specification, performance and value.
But lots of cultures favor the merchant: the cool shop has cool stuff, picked by the cool person who runs it. Those are are sellers that Ratuken empowers, even online.
As far as *who the Chinese nouveaux riches trust* when buying overseas assets, for now, they trust other Chinese. Makes me nuts, because being from the same province as the coal tycoon hardly conveys expertise in Manhattan real estate.
By the same token, advice for young Mandarin speakers looking for work in China: if you can't sell to other non-Chinese passport holders better than a bilingual local, if you can't offer the trust of outsiders, where's the value prop?
Posted by: Janet Carmosky | May 04, 2010 at 11:31 AM