Yahoo Japan and Chinese e-commerce giant Taobao have joined forces to launch a new service catering to customers in both countries. Japanese customers will be able to buy products from Chinese companies and the other way around. The two companies say this new service will become the largest e-commerce hub in the world, dwarfing the popular US-based eBay.

The joint effort gets underway today with the launch of the Yahoo Japan China Mall, where Japanese customers can purchase products from small Chinese businesses. The corresponding site for Chinese customers is TaoJapan. Both sites are designed for their local audience and are translated into either Japanese or Chinese, depending on the case.

The product descriptions are also translated to enable potential customers to know what they are actually buying. This has been one of the major hurdles facing cross-border online commerce. Product descriptions and most of the dynamic content will likely be made available through machine translation.

See: Softpedia