For consumer products in Japan, your own website is frequently the fourth place a buyer looks. The first three are marketplaces, and they do not behave like the single-marketplace markets many foreign brands are used to.
This is the structure, what search means inside each one, and the single strategic difference that decides how much control you keep.
Japan has three major marketplaces, not one
In many markets, marketplace strategy means Amazon strategy. In Japan there are three that matter, and a brand present on only one is invisible to a large share of buyers who never shop there.
| Marketplace | Model | What drives loyalty |
|---|---|---|
| Rakuten Ichiba | Tenant. Each seller runs a branded storefront and owns its own product pages. | Rakuten points, spanning banking, mobile, travel and cards. |
| Amazon.co.jp | Catalog. One page per product, shared by every seller of that product. | Prime, delivery speed, familiarity. |
| Yahoo!ショッピング | Tenant, with no initial fee; a monthly fee and a sales royalty have applied since September 2026. | PayPay points, and the LY Corporation ecosystem around them. |
A note on currency, because some outdated guides still get it wrong: PayPayモール was folded into Yahoo!ショッピング in October 2022. It no longer exists as a separate destination, and any plan that lists it as a distinct channel was written before that.
Tenant versus catalog: the difference that matters most
In our view, this distinction is worth more than any tactic on this page.
- On a tenant marketplace, the page is yours. You control the copy, the images, the length, the order of the argument. Rakuten pages tend to be long, dense and heavily designed for this reason — the seller is building a sales page, not filling in a form.
- On a catalog marketplace, the page is the product’s. Multiple sellers attach to one listing, and the content can be edited by parties other than you. Brand registry programs exist to reduce that, but the underlying model does not change.
The practical consequence for a foreign brand: on Rakuten and Yahoo!ショッピング you can tell your story; on Amazon you mostly cannot. Teams that arrive with an Amazon-shaped playbook often build thin, specification-led pages everywhere and wonder why the Rakuten storefront underperforms. The Rakuten page is supposed to look like a landing page, because that is what it is.
Marketplace search is not Google search
Search inside a marketplace answers a different question — not “which page best explains this?” but “which listing is most likely to be bought?” The inputs reflect that.
- Recent sales velocity, which tends to make rankings self-reinforcing and launches genuinely hard.
- Reviews — volume and rating, and in Japan they tend to accumulate slowly.
- Price including shipping, and increasingly the points multiplier, which works as a discount many buyers actively calculate.
- The title field, which on Japanese marketplaces carries far more keywords than many Western sellers expect. Japanese listing titles look overloaded to a foreign eye. They are written that way largely because the internal search rewards it.
Little of this transfers to Google, and Google’s rules do not transfer here either. They are separate disciplines that happen to share the word “search.”
The points economy is more than a discount program
Foreign teams tend to read Rakuten points and PayPay points as loyalty programs. For a large number of Japanese consumers they are closer to a parallel currency, earned and spent across mobile bills, credit cards, travel and groceries.
The effect on your listing is concrete: a buyer comparing two products is often comparing net cost after points, not price. A campaign multiplier can outweigh a price difference entirely. If your Japanese pricing strategy ignores points, it is comparing the wrong number.
What this means for your own website
Here is the part that we think changes how you plan Japanese SEO.
Your marketplace listings often outrank your own site on Google for your own products. Rakuten and Amazon.co.jp are enormous domains, and a product query frequently returns their pages ahead of yours. In our view, fighting that is a poor use of budget.
A more productive response is to decide what your own site is actually for, and it is usually not the transaction.
- Let the marketplaces have the buying query. Make sure the listings are good, priced sensibly against points, and reviewed.
- Own the deciding query. How to use it, how to choose between options, how it compares, what the ingredient or specification actually means. In our experience, this demand is larger than the product query, and the marketplaces serve it badly.
- Own the company question. Who you are, where it is made, how you source. Marketplace listings rarely carry this well, and many Japanese buyers look for it.
- Link deliberately from your content to your listings, so the demand you create lands where the transaction is easiest rather than leaking to a competitor’s listing.
We wrote about where that deciding demand actually sits in consumer brands in Japan. The marketplace layer is one likely reason the pattern is so consistent: the bottom of the funnel is already occupied, so the value on your own domain lies above it.
Common questions
Do we need all three marketplaces?
Not on day one. Start with the one where your category is strongest, prove the operation, then add. In our view, running three badly is worse than running one well, because reviews and sales velocity both compound and neither starts over.
Can we skip marketplaces and sell direct?
You can, and you will be asking Japanese consumers to buy from an unfamiliar foreign brand on an unfamiliar checkout, without points. That is a real ask. Direct-only tends to work for strong brands and for categories where the marketplaces are weak — it is a deliberate choice, not a default.
Should our marketplace pages copy our website copy?
We’d recommend against it. Different reader, different moment, different format conventions — and on tenant marketplaces the expected page is considerably longer and more visual than a Western product page.
Does marketplace performance help our Google rankings?
Not directly. Indirectly, it can help a great deal: it builds brand searches, and brand searches are demand your own site can capture with relatively little competition.
Working on Japan?
Nihongo Search is published by Amanaut, Inc., a small Japanese SEO and content company in Tokyo working with companies entering the Japanese market, including consumer brands whose Japanese sales run through the marketplace layer. Everything is produced natively in Japanese. The wider sequence is in our Japan SEO guide. More about how we work.
Last reviewed: October 2026.
