Walmart teams up with major Japanese e-commerce player Rakuten

Walmart who is one of the largest e-commerce retailers announced to team up with most successful e-commerce retailer Rakuten to run an online grocery business in Japan and e-readers, audiobooks and e-books in the US.

Grocery e-commerce shop in Japan:

In this partnership, in the third quarter of 2018, an online grocery store will be co-created by Rakuten and Seiyu Netsuper in Japan named Rakuten Seiyu Netsuper. According to a research, Japanese consumers spent $19 billion dollars for food deliveries in March 2017. Seiyu already owns an online grocery store which will be modified into this new one that means Rakuten Seiyu Netsuper will not have to do effort from the very start. To take the additional advantage of e-commerce technology Rakuten will help to build the website for online grocery store including big data and A.I. Rakuten Seiyu Netsuper will offer partially prepared food, fresh fruits and vegetables, pre-prepared food and gourmet foods.

Kobo and Walmart teamed up:

Kobo is an e-reader and Walmart teamed up with it for the online bookstore in the US. Kobo’s e-books and audiobook selection will be added to Walmart’s website later this year. Kobo has nearly 6 million ebooks and audiobooks from hundreds of thousands of authors and it will bring all of them on Walmart.com. It is very difficult to succeed in the US as Amazon held 83% of ebooks sales in the US whereas kobo only held 3% as compared to this the competition between those two is closer in Canada where kobo had a sale of nearly 25% and Amazon had 57%.

Both companies will launch a co-branded app Walmart/kobo app, which will be available for Android, IOS and pc. This app will replace kobo’s current app on app stores but the company did not explain how the transaction process will work for current kobo users.

Walmart is very confident about it as he said,” Rakuten is a strong e-commerce business and we’re excited to collaborate with the top online shopping destination in Japan and everywhere we operate, we’re constantly exploring new ways to make every day easier for customers by offering great experiences in stores, online, via mobile no matter how customers want to shop”.