Rakuten Remains Committed to Indonesia with Payment Gateway Upgrade and Global Marketplace Launch

Ryota Inaba, President Director and CEO of PT Rakuten-MNC

Rakuten’s (JSD:4755) Indonesian e-commerce site, Rakuten Belanja Online (RBO), turns two-years old today. Coinciding with today’s anniversary, RBO also announces its cross border e-commerce platform that promises users a better user interface and more products coming from overseas. It’s scheduled to be launched on June 3 in Indonesia.

With the global cross-border platform for Rakuten users in Indonesia, merchants in the country are also able to do cross-border trades in different Rakuten marketplaces backed up by an enhanced language support via its translation and review process. So far the same global e-commerce platform has already been launched in Malaysia. We asked Rakuten about how it will tackle logistics and payments across border barriers and will update when we hear back.

RBO also sees an upgrade in its payment process by partnering with Veritrans, a payment gateway company headed by founder Ryu Kawano. RBO was previously using Doku for this, but Ryota Inaba explained that trust, chemistry, and Veritrans’ fraud detection system has won them over.

So much for the Rakuten and MNC split-up story. Ryota Inaba, president director and CEO of the Rakuten-MNC joint venture, started his presentation at the RBO office at MNC tower this afternoon by emphasizing that Rakuten is here to stay in Indonesia. Inaba says that Rakuten and MNC are still a team and insisted that the split up story is a rumor. He also highlighted Rakuten’s financial strength that it will be able to finance RBO to success in Indonesia. He said in the statement:

Rakuten is confident that Indonesia has the potential to become the biggest e-commerce market in Asia. The launch of our new Global E-Commerce Platform and payment gateway signifies Rakuten’s continued and deepened commitment to merchants and customers in Indonesia

In Indonesia, RBO says that it is experiencing fast growth. Its gross merchant sales grew by more than 115 percent year on year (YoY), paid orders grew by 257 percent YoY, and the number of online shops increased by 129 percent YoY. RBO also sees huge growth in mobile orders, seeing 438 percent of growth YoY. No absolute figure was revealed, unfortunately.