Yahoo! China Mall

» see chinamall.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Yahoo! JAPAN and Alibaba opened the two halves of this thing on 1 June 2010. Yahoo! China Mall faced Japan and sold Taobao's goods; Tao Japan faced China and sold Yahoo! Shopping's. Roughly fifty million listings sat on the Japanese side at launch with more promised, against a market the Japanese press was describing as three times the size of Rakuten.

The plumbing behind a single order was heavier than the front page let on. A purchasing agent in China checked the item physically and paid the merchant, then put it through customs at Narita before it reached the buyer, and the merchant's own first step was to ship the goods to a Taobao center rather than to anybody who had ordered them. From the Japanese side none of that showed. The sign-in was an ordinary Yahoo! JAPAN account, the checkout ran in Japanese, and the support mail came back from Yahoo.

The one place the seam showed was the product descriptions. Those were the Chinese original text put through a machine translator and left exactly as it came out, and in 2010 that produced Japanese nobody wanted to buy from. Living in neither of the two countries this thing connected, I was never in its customer base at any point, but the particular way it came apart reads clearly from outside. Everything about the service worked except the sentences describing what you were buying.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the translation did ~

Japanese commentary on the closure lists the causes together, and the translation accuracy is the one that comes first. After it come the goods each country's regulations would not let cross, and then two events belonging to no part of the retail business whatsoever. Yahoo! China Mall launched in June 2010; the fishing-boat collision near the Senkaku Islands came that September, and the anti-Japanese feeling that followed was reported to have left Japanese goods sitting in Chinese customs. The Tohoku earthquake came in March 2011, and after it Chinese buyers had questions about radiation that no amount of product copy could answer.

~ the other way round ~

Tao Japan went in the same month and for different reasons. Web Tan reported on 4 April 2012 that the China-facing mall was closing in May because regulation and the earthquake had kept its transaction volume from growing, and Toyo Keizai put the two Yahoo properties alongside Rakuten's Chinese venture Lekutian, which was closing in the same stretch. Japan's two largest e-commerce companies both gave up on selling into China in the spring of 2012.

The Yahoo! China Mall tombstone went up between 24 March and 5 April 2012, which the archive records as the homepage dropping from 9,298 bytes to 2,917. What is left on it is a dated sentence and a redirection: service ends Thursday 17 May 2012, the company will keep considering overseas purchasing agency services, please continue to favor Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions. Fifty million Chinese listings had been reachable in Japanese twenty-three months earlier. Yahoo signed the notice off with an apology for the inconvenience and a request that users understand.

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