Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Rakuten’s philosophy is the opposite, creating a site that Bernard Luthi, the COO for Rakuten.com Shopping (that was Buy.com before Rakuten bought and rebranded it), said was one designed for shopping, not necessarily buying and certainly not necessarily buying right now.

Rakuten’s approach therefore places an emphasis on storytelling, including features about the product and how it’s grown or manufactured. And in a move that design-wise is radically different from many major U.S. sites, the company wants very long pages, with lots of video and pictures and elements. They prefer to have shoppers scrolling than clicking. (Here’s a sample Rakuten page.)

Will this likely give Amazon a reason to worry, given how much importance it places on its marketplace? That could truly go either way—and that really should worry Amazon.

The best argument in favor of Rakuten faring well in the U.S. is that a very large number of Amazon sellers are quite angry with Amazon’s policies. The best argument in favor of Amazon emerging mostly unscathed? Those sellers generally make better dollars from Amazon than they can anywhere else. Being upset with Amazon is one thing: alienating the cash cow is quite another.

Some merchants might want to try selling on both platforms, but Amazon could easily crack down on its rules, forcing merchants to make a choice. Amazon knows that if it forces such a choice soon—before Rakuten has a chance to attract a lot of American shoppers—it will fare well.

Today, the U.S. Rakuten site has about 3,000 U.S. merchants, COO Luthi said, but almost all of them were simply the old Buy.com merchants. He said the real fireworks are likely to start in mid-August when the site will run a “super sale,” which he described as a week-long Black Friday.

Amazon has would have the option of fighting back by sweetening its marketplace contracts and procedures (and even money). One move that would quiet resentment would be agreeing to let merchants permanently own categories and then allowing them to more prominently promote themselves in the Amazon listings.

Rakuten has said that it would give its merchants access to email addresses and other information about its shoppers, something that Amazon has been hesitant to do. (Example: StorefrontBacktalk has no idea who subscribes to the Amazon Kindle version of StorefrontBacktalk. We know the numberof subscribers, but that’s it.)

From the global competitive perspective, Amazon is well entrenched and has many ways to fight off Rakuten in its U.S. home turf. But from the marketplace retailer perspective, if Rakuten makes an aggressive play for them, it might force Amazon to be a lot friendlier. In that light, Mikitani’s comment about E-commerce friends turning into enemies and enemies turning into friends could have an entirely different meaning.