Mixi and DeNA Announce Social Commerce Partnership

Japanese social networking giant Mixi and leading social gaming platform DeNA have announced a partnership in field of social commerce.

The strength of Mixi is its real life social graph that extends over 25 million users as of September 2011. According to Mixi, people in their 20s account for about 50 percent of its total users. That breaks down to 29.3 percent for users age 20-24, and 22.1 percent for users ages between 25-29 (see interactive chart below). Most active users access Mixi from mobile which accounts for a whopping 80 percent of the total traffic.

DeNa (TYO:2432) is no stranger to online shopping, as it operates a huge shopping and auction website called bidders. It sells over 8 million items ranging from fashion, cosmetics to gourmet. Bidders is available for featured phones and PCs, and is also optimized for smartphone as well. It allows users to shop using points and coins collected from the gaming platform Mobage.

Even with the rise of Facebook and Twitter, when it comes to friendships based on real-life relationships in Japan, Mixi is still without a doubt THE social network. It is having difficulty with retention of users due to new and more open competitors though. But for younger generations, it is still a place where they exchange messages everyday with friends.

The biggest annual campaign thrown by Mixi is its “mixi christmas” campaign, where users ring each others Christmas bells to earn points which allow them to decorate their Christmas stockings and win presents. The 2010 campaign gathered more than a million mixi users within 58 hours of release, and the total number of users surpassed 3 million within 25 days. But one challenge for mixi is the lack of buying experience by the users, who are not used to spending money on the site. Hopefully this new partnership with DeNA will help to solve this issue.

Planned for late March, the two companies will open an online mall within Mixi. Prior to it’s release, big companies such as Lawson HMV entertainment, Sanrio (famous for Hello Kitty), and Cecil McBee (a very popular apparel brand that can be found in 109 stores in Shibuya) have already signed up to join the mall.