Japan's Three Doors for K-Beauty: Qoo10, Rakuten and Amazon Compared
Qoo10 Japan holds over 30 percent of Japan's online beauty category and is now owned by eBay, not the Singapore company that went into liquidation in 2024. Many Korean brands wrote it off for the wrong reason. Meanwhile e-commerce is under 10 percent of Japan's cosmetics market.
Start with the correction, because it is costing Korean brands the best channel in Japan.
When Qoo10's Singapore parent collapsed, a lot of Korean brands quietly removed Japan's strongest K-beauty platform from their plans. The reasoning was understandable and the conclusion was wrong.
Qoo10 Pte Ltd, the Singapore entity, was ordered into compulsory liquidation in November 2024. That is the company behind the TMON and WeMakePrice settlement crisis in Korea.
Qoo10 Japan is a different business. eBay acquired Giosis's Japan operations, and the platform now runs under eBay Japan LLC, a wholly owned eBay subsidiary, which joined Keidanren in June 2026. It is not part of the liquidated entity and carries none of its settlement risk.
We could not pin down the exact date the acquisition legally closed, with sources disagreeing between 2025 and 2026, so we are marking that specific detail unverified. The ownership itself is not in doubt.
Why Qoo10 Japan matters more than its reputation suggests
The numbers are not marginal. Qoo10 Japan holds over 30 percent of Japan's online beauty category, ahead of Amazon, Rakuten and Yahoo in that category specifically. It reports 28 million members and 35 million monthly active users.
Its Mega Debut incubator supported 200 brands in its first year. 188 of them were K-beauty. Cumulative sales through the programme reached 3.35 billion yen, with 48 brands passing 10 million yen in quarterly sales. Company revenue was reported at 68.4 billion won, up 56.3 percent year on year, with operating and net profit both turning positive.
innisfree runs an official Qoo10 Japan store. Anua operates official stores on both Qoo10 Japan and Rakuten.
If your Japan plan does not include Qoo10, the question to answer is why, and "the Qoo10 collapse" is not a valid answer.
The context that reframes all three platforms
Here is the number that should govern your Japan strategy: e-commerce is under 10 percent of Japan's total cosmetics market.
Offline drugstores, variety stores and department stores still dominate, because Japanese consumers strongly prefer to test products physically and weight safety and brand trust above price.
So a brand treating Qoo10, Rakuten and Amazon as the whole Japan opportunity is competing for under a tenth of the market. The platforms are the entry route and the proving ground. They are not the destination. Plan the offline path from the start, and use online performance as the evidence that earns you a drugstore buyer meeting.
Rakuten Ichiba
Rakuten's pitch to overseas merchants is that no Japanese entity is required. Its overseas merchant programme covers 22 countries and lets brands ship direct from home.
That claim is legally true and operationally misleading. You still need Japanese language storefront management, Japanese customer support and compliance communication. Rakuten's own onboarding material makes this clear. "No entity required" removes a corporate barrier, not an operational one.
Onboarding runs in three stages, application and screening, contract and RMS account, then store setup, taking roughly a month and a half in total. That timeline comes from consultancy sources rather than Rakuten directly, so treat it as indicative.
Costs:
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Initial registration | 60,000 yen, all plans |
| Monthly plan fee | 25,000 yen entry plan to 130,000 yen Mega Shop |
| System usage commission | Roughly 2.0 to 7.0 percent depending on plan |
| Rakuten Points liability | About 1 percent of sales |
| Super Affiliate commission | 2.6 to 5.2 percent on affiliate-driven sales |
| R-Cabinet storage | Additional |
Aggregate overhead commonly lands at 10 to 15 percent of sales. Monthly plan fees rose about 30 percent in June 2024, the first increase in sixteen years.
Rakuten holds roughly 28 percent of Japan's overall B2C e-commerce market, though its beauty-specific share trails Qoo10's.
Amazon Japan and the importer problem
Amazon Japan has a structural issue that catches foreign sellers.
Amazon will not act as Importer of Record. Since October 2023, foreign FBA sellers must appoint an Attorney for Customs Procedures, an ACP, to act as IOR on their behalf. Without one, shipments get held at customs. ACP registration with Japan Customs typically completes in about two weeks. Service costs are quoted privately and not published, so we cannot give a figure.
Acting as IOR through an ACP does carry a benefit: it makes the foreign company eligible for Japanese Consumption Tax input credits.
Which leads to the deadline most Korean brands have not diarised.
JCT registration is urgent if you sell B2B into Japan. Registration is mandatory above 10 million yen of taxable sales in the base period and voluntary below it. The Qualified Invoice System has been in force since October 2023, and transitional input credit relief for buyers purchasing from unregistered suppliers steps down from 1 October 2026, dropping to 50 percent through September 2029 and to zero from October 2029.
Read the consequence plainly. If you supply Japanese distributors or resellers and you are not JCT registered, your Japanese buyers lose half their input credit on your invoices from October 2026. You become commercially unattractive to your own customers within weeks, not years. Foreign companies without a Japanese office generally need to appoint a tax agent to register.
Amazon referral fees run 5 to 15.4 percent by category. We could not confirm the cosmetics-specific rate, since Amazon Japan's fee schedule requires a seller login, so treat any quoted cosmetics figure as unverified.
The regulatory gate that applies to every channel
None of the platform decisions matter until this is solved.
Under Japan's PMD Act, a Korean brand cannot import and market cosmetics in Japan without a Japan-incorporated Marketing Authorisation Holder holding a Cosmetics Marketing Authorisation Licence. The MAH carries product liability and handles post-market surveillance and adverse event reporting. In practice most foreign brands partner with an existing licensed Japanese importer or distributor rather than obtaining their own MAH licence.
Ingredients work on positive lists with concentration caps for UV filters, preservatives and tar colourants. Everything else is permitted after safety review unless prohibited.
And here is the trap specific to Korean brands.
Your 기능성화장품 certification counts for nothing in Japan, and can actively slow you down. Products making functional claims around brightening, strong anti-ageing or medicated effects get pushed into Japan's quasi-drug category, which requires pre-market approval of both the product and its active ingredients. That is a separate and considerably slower track than standard cosmetics notification.
Korean functional cosmetics formulas trigger this regularly. A brand that leads with its Korean functional certification may be signalling exactly the claim that routes it into the slow lane. Reformulation or claim adjustment is often faster than pursuing quasi-drug approval.
For food, every shipment requires a Declaration on Importation submitted to a quarantine station from seven days before arrival, not a one-time registration. Food additives run on a positive list, which catches Korean processed foods using Korea-legal additives absent from Japan's list.
How Korean cosmetics are actually performing in Japan
K-beauty ranked first in Japan's imported cosmetics market for a fourth consecutive year in 2025, with imports from Korea reaching 141.77 billion yen, about 910 million dollars, or 30.8 percent of Japan's total cosmetics import value. The gap over second-placed France widened to 8 percentage points.
But growth decelerated sharply: up 40 percent in 2024, up only 5.6 percent in 2025.
From the Korean export side, cosmetics exports to Japan rose 5 percent to 1.09 billion dollars in 2025, making Japan Korea's third largest destination behind the United States at 2.19 billion and China at 2.01 billion.
The deceleration is the signal worth reading. Japan is a large, won market rather than an expanding one. Entering now means taking share, not riding growth.
Choosing
Qoo10 Japan if your priority is K-beauty specific reach and the Mega Debut programme fits your stage. Highest beauty category share, an incubator that has demonstrably worked for Korean brands, and none of the settlement risk people assume.
Rakuten if you want a branded storefront and can staff Japanese language operations. No entity required, but real operational commitment, and 10 to 15 percent aggregate overhead.
Amazon Japan if you can solve the ACP and IOR structure and are selling into a category where Amazon's logistics advantage matters. Handle JCT registration before October 2026 regardless.
And in every case, treat the platform as the first 10 percent of the market rather than the market itself.
Platform fees, regulatory requirements and market data cited here are current as of publication. Rakuten onboarding timelines and Amazon cosmetics referral rates are drawn from third-party sources and marked as indicative. Confirm current terms directly with each platform before committing.