Taobao and Yahoo Japan's eCommerce platform beating eBay ?

China's largest e-retailer Taobao and Yahoo! Japan have joined forces to launch a cross-border eCommerce hub on June 1st.

Taobao and Yahoo Japan launch the largest eCommerce platform

Announced a few weeks ago, the partnership creates the world's biggest online marketplace, beating US rival eBay in terms of users and products on offer. Indeed, the service is expected to attract 250 million customers and offer more than 450 million products.

The joint service allows Internet users in China and Japan to buy and sell using systems translated into their native languages. Yahoo! JAPAN China Mall now offers 50 millions products from Chinese businesses to its Japenese consumers while on the other way around Chinese Internet users can buy 8 millions Japense items on TaoJapan.

Taobao is a subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. Japan's mobile phone carrier SoftBank owns shares in both Taobao and Yahoo! Japan.

eBay's leadership in danger

After this announcement that threatens eBay's leadership in the e-Commerce market, the US company clearly had to react ; and it did by signing an international tri-lateral agreement with China Post and the United States Postal Service to provide easier shipping procedures for Chinese vendors who sell to American customers.

Besides, eBay launched an online tracking system with China Post Express & Logistics Corp, a unit of China Post. The partnership creates a new shipping platform for international tracking and delivery of lightweight goods ordered by consumers in the US from eBay sellers in China.

Other threat for eBay: Baidu, China's top search engine in terms of market share, which announced in January that it'd set up a joint venture with Japanese retail website Rakuten to launch a shopping mall targeting domestic web users in the second half of 2010. And by the way, Rakuten also recently acquired a domain name that can be well appropriated: Buy.com (for $250 million)...