Nikkei reported [J, subscription required] that Yahoo! Japan and Taobao are discussing to interconnect their shopping services between Japan and China in summer. Yahoo! Japan holds Yahoo! Shopping, No.2 online shopping service after Rakuten Ichiba. Taobao is China’s largest shopping site in Alibaba group. Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba are related via the common investor Softbank.
In January, we reported that Japan No.1 Rakuten and China’s No.1 Search Engine Baidu allied to provide Rakuten’s shopping service in China.
Yahoo! Japan and Taobao shopping sites are supposed to show their partners’ products with machine translated product information. Yahoo! Japan has been running similar shopping service in Japanese-English machine translation with eBay, the world largest shopping service.
