Rakuten's 1997 marketplace let anyone open a shop — a mall without inventory

Hiroshi Mikitani founded Rakuten in February 1997 with a bet that ordinary Japanese merchants would open shops on the internet if the door were cheap and easy. Rakuten Ichiba, launched that May, was a marketplace — B2B2C — where anyone could rent a storefront; by 2000 it charged a flat ¥50,000 monthly rent with no commission, against Yahoo's carefully vetted shops, which had only 49 stores in Japan compared with Rakuten's 2,882.

The economics inverted the mall: Rakuten carried no inventory, no delivery risk and no price risk, because the merchants owned all three. The platform grew by opening doors: 6,000 shops by 2002, when it also introduced success-based fees and a points system; GMV crossed the ¥1 trillion target set in 2001 during Q4 FY2006, and continued to ¥3 trillion by 2020.

Mikitani's empire widened into banking, cards, travel and telecom on the same membership logic. The shoemaker's rule held: the marketplace collects rent on everyone else's inventory, and the 1997 rent-a-shop bet became one of Japan's largest internet groups.

Own the bazaar

Flat rent instead of commission made the first shop easy: merchants understood '¥50,000 a month' instantly, and easy entry produced the volume of shops that later made the take-rate model possible.

Zero inventory means zero risk: every structural risk of retail — stock, returns, demand — stayed with the merchants, so Rakuten could scale as fast as its landlords allowed.

The points system turned membership into a moat: unified points across shops, cards and travel raised switching costs for both buyer and seller — network effects on both sides of the market.

If you can rent the marketplace instead of owning the stock, do it: flat rents invite the crowd that makes the network, and the risk you never take is the margin you never lose

Rakuten grew into one of Japan's largest internet groups — e-commerce, cards, banking, mobile — on the membership mesh built from the 1997 launch; the Ichiba model remains the reference for marketplace-first commerce in Japan.