Walmart partners with Rakuten to sell 1,200 US branded products on Rakuten Ichiba, Japan's largest e-commerce store
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third Walmart–Rakuten tie-up of 2018 and the deepest yet. The pair started the year with a joint online grocery service in Japan plus Kobo e-readers sold in the US, then extended into media with the Walmart eBooks launch on Kobo's catalog. Now Walmart is putting physical goods — 1,200 US branded products — onto Rakuten Ichiba itself.
The direction of travel matters: Walmart is entering Japan through its partner's marketplace rather than building its own storefront, while Rakuten has been retreating from direct US retail, later confirming it would shut the former Buy.com operation it paid $250M for in 2010. Each side is effectively renting the other's home-market strength.
First-order effects
- US brands gain an immediate shelf on Japan's largest e-commerce site without setting up local operations, with Walmart acting as the merchandising layer on Rakuten Ichiba.
Second-order effects
- Rakuten gets differentiated inventory against Amazon Japan from a top global retailer at no inventory risk of its own — a meaningful answer as it simultaneously exits its own US retail business.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cross-border retail consolidates into alliance pairs that trade home-market access instead of competing head-on abroad — a structure the relationship later cemented when Rakuten raised $2.2B with Walmart among the new shareholders.
The trend: Global retailers are countering Amazon's scale by swapping home-market access through partnerships rather than building foreign operations themselves.