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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

Comparing apples to apples, Rakuten pages don't seem much different to me than Amazon or eBay, or AliExpress for instance:

- https://event.rakuten.co.jp/campaign/supersale/?l-id=search_...

- https://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox?ref_=nav_cs_gb

- https://www.ebay.com/e/row/shotime-ohtani

Japanese design can be wild and very different, but for anything with a very clear purpose, it will usually end up looking a lot like any other European or US page serving the same purpose.

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Big companies' web design seems to have gotten a bit westernized lately, but I think there's still a higher density on Japanese pages. E.g. compare https://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/customer/ with the same company's same page in English https://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/en/ . Or compare https://www.nta.go.jp/ with https://www.irs.gov/ .

Good point. For better or worse, most Japanese government sites firmly stayed in the 90s area design with very little images and CSS.

Tax agencies are a pretty good barometer of what is considered to be the minimal effort, for comparison

- France: https://www.impots.gouv.fr/

- Germany: https://www.bzst.de/

- Italy: https://www.agenziaentrate.gov.it/

France would be on par with the JP, and I actually kinda like the Italian trade-off of high info density upfront and more spacing and pictures coming way below the fold.

Funny that the Italian site is having trouble loading. The Italians are masters of design and attention to detail, yet are infamous for unreliable machinery. The tax website embodies the Italian essence right into the digital age.

I think I like the German design the best, by a pretty wide margin. The french design is terrible. Busy and hard to parse. The Italian is 2nd best to the German but has some advantages over the German design: Chiefly, links are clearly differentiated from text. Somehow though, the German design still manages to mostly differentiate the links from text by context with a couple of exceptions. The big advantage the German design has going for it, is that it's so clean and easy to parse. I can get into the correct pipeline in about 2 seconds. That's just not quite true for either of the others.

> compare https://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/customer/ with the same company's same page in English https://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/en/

Interesting to see the english version has a stereotypical animated background image / hero banner, and the japanese version foregoes it.

Yeah, while some designs have softened a bit seems like in a lot of the great sites the classic Japanese design remains.

In the C2C second hand market, Mercari is a somewhat modernized design: https://jp.mercari.com/ while the classic Kakaku is a great info dump that I love specially because it isn't banner heavy: https://kakaku.com/

The thing I hated from a lot of Japanese web sites is they relied a lot in images for formatting and lay out, and put a lot of text in those images, difficulting the reading or translation of those sites for foreigns and people with visual impairment.

But also Yahoo is quite different there ( https://auctions.yahoo.co.jp https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ ) and major electronics retailers still keep very dense designs ( https://www.biccamera.com/bc/main/ https://www.yodobashi.com/ )

Amazon item product pages are standardized. Rakuten item pages are basically all their own unique geocities webpage and even the ordering procedure isn’t fully standardized.

It’s a mess dealing with orders from Rakuten. I’m often searching for where I’m supposed to even buy the item. Amazon always has that link right at the top.

Yes, Rakuten is its own adventure.

I think the site is a good reflection of the service itself, as in the end you're really going through the order with the individual shop, and not much with Rakuten itself in my experience.

Last time I ordered something I was on the phone with the guy preparing it, making sure everything was right and I didn't need any specific adjustments. There might be stuff that actually go through Rakuten, but I didn't come across any of them yet.

What kind of good are you referring to, out of curiosity?

It was a city bike, and the seller contacted me to check my height (I suppose he wanted to roughly adjust the seat position, or if I'd be out of range ?), as well as the options I was planning to add, if I knew where to go buy an insurance etc.

Very friendly and helpful overall, we could have dealt with all the details by mail but he went straight to the phone.

Previous to that I had a vendor request more details about my street to know if they could deliver directly from their truck.

Ummm that first link is so loud I thought I was going to have a seizure...

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