Baidu Rakuten JV Opens Platform Backend
DoNews, 8/12/10
Baidu Rakuten, the B2C JV by Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) and Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten, opened its backend platform to merchant partners on August 10 for preliminary testing. Some of the merchants involved in the testing say that a portion of the platform's management functionality is currently available through the backend, and stores set up through the platform are already being crawled by Baidu, Google, and other search engines. A Baidu Rakuten employee said that all functionality would be available through the platform by the end of August, and the platform could launch "around October." The employee said that the JV has one employee to provide technical explanations and support for "every few merchants," offering help in listing products, configuring stores, and online marketing.
Baidu Rakuten has reportedly already issued merchants their official store URLs, which began appearing in Baidu and Google search results today. At present, however, the pages only display a Baidu-Rakuten logo and the name of the merchant.
Editor's Note: Stores set up through Baidu Rakuten will reportedly use the .CN top-level domain and have URIs in the following format: merchantname.shop.rakuten.cn.
Baidu CFO Jennifer Li had previously said that Baidu Rakuten would launch in Q4 of this year. Starting in Q4, Baidu will begin reporting Baidu Rakuten performance in its financial reports.
Keywords: Jennifer Li e-commerce Internet B2C Baidu JV Rakuten BIDU
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