Japanese Fashion E-Commerce Site Zozotown Seeks a Boost in Merchant Numbers With New Acquisition

Fashion e-commerce is usually at the cutting-edge of online shopping. That’s again evident in Japan today with the company behind one of the country’s top clothing e-stores, Zozotown, acquiring a neat startup service called Stores.jp that allows anyone to quickly get into the online selling business.

The financial terms of the deal haven’t been revealed. The Stores.jp system for easy creation of e-stores will be integrated into Zozotown (which is a C2C sales store). About 70 percent of stores created using Stores.jp are engaged in selling fashion items, so all those merchants could, if they wish, make an easy move over to selling on Zozotown. That could provide a big boost in the numbers of its merchants.

Stores.jp charges a monthly fee of about $10 to owners of stores created with its service. Stores.jp launched in September last year and has been used to create more than 40,000 online stores. The newly-acquired startup plans to reach 100,000 by the end of the year.

Stores.jp was created by a company called Bracket. As a result of the acquisition, the site is now owned by Start Today, the company that launched the well established Zozotown.

Zozotown is one of Japan’s top niche fashion sales sites, up there with Magaseek and Stylife. Magaseek was acquired by NTT Docomo earlier this year, while Stylife was recently bought out by e-commerce giant Rakuten.

Aside from doing well in Japan, the company also runs Zozotown.com in English and Chinese, which ships items from hundreds of Japanese merchants to customers in 82 countries.

(Source: Startup-Dating)

(Editing by Enricko Lukman)