Seesaa Drop Shipping

» see ds.seesaa.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 23 August 2006 Seesaa Inc. sent the Japanese press a release headed with a promise: the company would begin a drop shipping service that autumn. That autumn did not happen. The service opened on 1 October 2007, thirteen months after the announcement, and the release that went out on the day used the word 本日, meaning today, with no reference at all to the year that had gone past.

What it actually sold was the removal of inventory. You signed up as a seller, went through a catalog of roughly 250,000 items in categories like beauty products and small appliances, and picked something. Seesaa showed you one number, the 卸値 or wholesale floor, and that was the only price it set. Whatever you charged above it was yours. Seesaa then handled everything physical and everything legal, standing as the actual seller of record, so the person running the shop never saw a box or a complaint.

The blog is the part that locates this thing. Seesaa was a blog host before it was a storefront, with more than 1.2 million blogs open at launch, and the sales pitch was that an existing blog could become a shop in a few minutes because the traffic was already arriving. That is a narrow kind of commerce, aimed at people who already ran a Japanese blog with readers on it, and I have never run a Seesaa blog. The whole apparatus assumed an audience I was not inside.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the wholesale floor ~

Joining cost nothing, and there was no vetting. The about page said it plainly: no initial screening is performed when you register as a seller. An email address and a password put you in business. The money came out the other end instead, as a system fee of twenty percent charged on the gap between your price and the wholesale floor, and charged only when something sold. Sell nothing and you owed nothing.

The feature worth remembering is the one Seesaa called 直接販売機能, direct sales. Every other drop shipping service of the era needed the price fixed in advance, because the whole model ran on a link to a product page with a number on it. Seesaa let you settle the price first and order afterward. You agreed an amount with a buyer at an auction or face to face, typed that amount and their email address into the admin page, and the system mailed them a one-off URL that charged exactly that. It let a no-inventory business operate at an auction, where prices move, and in a room with another person, where there is no page at all.

~ the numbers against the promise ~

The launch release committed to two figures within twelve months: 500,000 items in the catalog and 100,000 users signed up. The 2006 announcement had been more modest and still missed, aiming at 150 suppliers and 10,000 sellers by that December, for a service that would not exist for another ten months.

Seesaa printed its own score across the head of the site, which makes the comparison easy and slightly brutal. On 21 March 2011, three and a half years in, the counter read 397,133 items and 26,186 registered sellers. The catalog had reached about four fifths of a target it was supposed to clear in a year. The seller count sat at roughly a quarter of its own. Nobody had lied about anything; the numbers had simply gone on being smaller than the plan for the service's entire life.

~ what the farewell page says ~

The same March 2011 capture carries something belonging to a completely different story. In the notices column, above the usual items about blog widgets and Twitter posting, sits a warning about service disruption from Tokyo Electric Power's rolling blackouts. The page was saved ten days after the Tohoku earthquake, and the drop shipping portal was carrying power-cut warnings next to its item count.

Four months later it was over. The front page was replaced by a short message in blue: thank you for using Seesaa DS, Seesaa DS ended its service on 31 July 2011, thank you for using it over such a long period. Three lines and one date, with no reason attached, and the file was last modified on 5 September. The opening had been given two press releases and the closing got none.

The corporate site did something odder. The marketing page for the service at seesaa.co.jp was quietly dropped from the navigation menu by July 2011, but the page itself kept serving its old copy, still describing the catalog and inviting suppliers to apply, as late as September 2012. For thirteen months after the thing was dead, Seesaa's own website was still selling it to anyone who arrived with the direct link. Both addresses are gone now. The company itself was absorbed on 1 January 2024, and Seesaa Blog, the host all of this was built to monetize, is still running.

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