auお買い物サーチ (au Okaimono Search)

» see au-shopping-search.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

At ten in the morning on Tuesday 15 June 2010, KDDI opened a shopping search site for Japanese mobile phones and claimed something specific in the press release: that no mobile carrier anywhere had run a price comparison service before. The name was au one Okaimono Search. It kept that name until March 2012, when KDDI retired the au one brand across the portal, and after that it was just auお買い物サーチ.

The important thing about it is what it refused to do. It sold nothing. Its own copy said so in plain terms, that the service does not sell products directly, and what it actually did was search across other people's shops and hand you to whichever one you picked. More than thirty million products were in the index at launch. That figure appears in the 2010 release and it is still the figure on the frozen page KDDI left behind three years later, which is a fair indication of how much attention the catalogue got after opening day.

Two dozen shops were named on day one, and the mix is a good photograph of Japanese e-commerce in 2010. Rakuten and Yahoo Shopping were there, next to Dell and HMV, next to a row of catalog retailers like Belle Maison and Nissen. KDDI also listed its own stores, au Records and au Books among them, so the carrier was quietly comparison-shopping against itself. The back end belonged to ECNavi, a Shibuya company that renamed itself VOYAGE GROUP in 2011 and spun the operation into a wholly owned subsidiary called Flessel in October 2012.

~ the dossier ~

~ how you reached it ~

You pressed the EZ button on an au handset. That opened the top menu, and you went down into a section called 知る, which means to know, and inside that there was a heading reading 価格比較. Price comparison. No app, no download, no address to type, just a position in a menu tree that the phone company controlled end to end.

That arrangement has no equivalent in anything I used. In Turkey the operator decided what your phone cost and how much a text message was, and its interest in you stopped there. In Japan the operator decided where the price comparison link sat in the menu, which meant it also decided, for a great many people, where shopping began.

~ the shopper you could hire ~

On 19 April 2011 it got a feature I have not seen anywhere else. You could describe something you had seen in a magazine, and a person would go and find it, buy it, and post it to you. The service was called 買い物代行, shopping by proxy, and it had a published price: 1,500 yen for anything under 10,000, scaling up to ten percent of the price once you went over 50,000. Delivery in as little as two days.

A search engine that will dispatch a human being when the search fails is an idea with an obvious ceiling, and it arrived ten months after launch, which is usually a sign that the thing it was bolted onto was not performing. KDDI never published a user number for any of it. Not at launch, not when free membership and points arrived in November 2010, not in 2011, and not at the end.

~ two names for the same day ~

On 6 June 2013, a Thursday, the service stopped. The only public announcement came from Flessel, at eleven o'clock that same morning, calling it a 大刷新, a major renewal, and describing it as an integration into the au Points Program. KDDI's own page uses a different word, 終了, ended. Both are accurate and they describe the same event from opposite ends: the function moved into a section of the points program called the earning corner, and the brand it had been wearing went away.

KDDI said nothing at the time on either channel it uses for this. There is no entry for the service in its 2013 press-release index, and the path where it files service notices has no posting at all between the middle of April and the middle of July that year, in a stretch where every notice it did publish is still being served today. A product that opened with a numbered press release and an attachment page listing all 24 merchants was closed without a word, and the sentence recording the end was added to its own page afterwards.

The date was not chosen for this product. 6 June 2013 was the day KDDI merged the entire au portal into au Smart Pass, announced two weeks earlier in a release that does not mention shopping search at all. A whole platform was being rearranged, and this product did not get a seat. Its old URLs kept redirecting into the points program for at least another thirteen months before the domain went dark.

~ only the door survives ~

The Internet Archive crawled au-shopping-search.jp and came away with almost nothing, because the site checked what you were and turned you away if the answer was wrong. The two pages that did get captured are both rejections. One is a carrier check that apologizes and explains that this is an au-only site. The other is a device check: a list of roughly 150 au model numbers, running back from the K005 and the SH008 through the W21 era, which is the full set of handsets allowed through the door.

So the only durable record of a thirty-million-product shopping engine is the bouncer. Everything inside was served exclusively to phones that have not existed for a decade, on a network that stopped speaking that protocol in 2022, and no machine capable of writing any of it down was ever let through. A walled garden is remembered by the wall.

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