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BASE runs an online shop-building platform in Japan that helps small businesses sell products on the internet.
BASE is a Japanese internet company that gives small businesses the tools to open an online store in minutes. Its main product is an e-commerce platform where a bakery, a craft seller, or a clothing brand can set up a shop, list products, and start taking orders without hiring a developer or paying for a pricey custom website. That platform, called BASE, is the heart of the business, and it serves hundreds of thousands of small merchants who pay little or nothing upfront.
The way it makes money is smart and simple. Opening a shop is free, but BASE takes a small cut of each sale, and it sells extra services on top — things like a paid plan with more features, payment processing, and tools for building a proper online store. Because the base product is free to start, it attracts a huge crowd of tiny sellers who would never pay for expensive software, and BASE earns a little from each one as they grow. The company's most interesting move came in 2021, when it acquired Pay ID, a payment service, and folded it into a brand called Yoi Shiharai that lets shoppers pay later in installments. The logic was to keep more of the money flowing through its shops inside the company instead of handing it to outside payment providers. BASE also owns a small venture and studio business, but the online shop platform is overwhelmingly what pays the bills, and the company has been profitable in recent years as it pushed to grow beyond its free-shop roots.
In late 2012, Yuta Tsuruoka started BASE to fix two headaches for anyone wanting to sell online. Getting approval to accept payments took too long, and building a good-looking shop usually meant hiring someone who could code. BASE's answer was a service that let anyone open a well-designed online shop right away, launched the same day the company was founded.
By 2019, BASE was big enough to list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's Mothers market, now called the Growth Market. But the market gave it a cool welcome: shares opened below the offering price, and the company was still losing money on its core business. It was a public company now, but not yet a profitable one.
Still, more and more people kept opening shops on BASE. By mid-2021, the total number of shops ever opened on the platform passed 1.5 million — a sign that the simple, no-code shop idea was catching on with a huge crowd of small sellers.
Then the story turned. By late 2021, growth was slowing even as the company spent more and more on marketing, and the share price had fallen sharply from its 2020 peak. Analysts doubted BASE could hit its medium-term revenue targets, and the money-losing new ventures made the picture look worse.
Starting in late 2023, a single investor — Hiroyuki Maki, president of Melco Holdings — began buying BASE shares fast, and by spring 2024 he owned more than a fifth of the company and was its largest shareholder. BASE tried to put up defenses against a possible takeover bid, the share price slid, and the two sides ended up in private talks that kept getting extended. How that standoff would end was not yet clear.
Meanwhile, BASE kept building. In spring 2023 it added AI features to its shop platform and jumped into the buy now, pay later business, letting shoppers split payments — a way to help merchants sell more and to earn money beyond shop subscriptions.
In summer 2024, BASE bought want.jp, a service that helps sellers sell across borders. It was a step toward giving its merchants more ways to reach customers outside Japan.
The bigger move came in mid-2025, when BASE bought all of Estore Corporation, a major provider of e-commerce services for larger merchants. The deal pushed the group's total yearly merchandise sold to roughly 500 billion yen. Now BASE could offer its services to Estore's merchants and grow its wider e-commerce support business — a real shift from serving only small shops.
The payoff showed up in the numbers: yearly sales jumped almost 30% and operating profit more than doubled, helped by the core BASE business and by folding in Estore. The company announced its first-ever dividend and a share buyback, and laid out a plan for jump-starting growth with more acquisitions, focusing on companies that sell physical goods and using about 10 billion yen in cash. The scrappy shop builder had become a profitable e-commerce group.
The big risks are competition and thin margins. Large rivals crowd the space — Shopify is the global heavyweight, and Rakuten runs one of Japan's biggest online marketplaces. BASE's own shops are tiny, so it wins on simplicity and price rather than scale. Founded in 2012 and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, BASE bet that millions of small Japanese sellers wanted a cheap, easy door to the internet — and it built its business around being that door.
Saved answer · last researched 6 Nov 2026