Aratana

Aratana Inc. was an e-commerce technology company founded in May 2007 by Shinji Hamauzu and his high school classmate Kazunari Homitsu in Miyazaki, Japan. The founders were driven by a desire to assist local retailers in building and managing their online stores. The company's mission was to create 1,000 jobs in Miyazaki and to invigorate the present and future of online shopping.

The company provided a range of services for online businesses, including e-commerce site construction, marketing support, and operational services. One of its core products was "Cagolab," a package for building online shops based on the EC-CUBE open-source e-commerce platform. Aratana offered one-stop support that covered design, system construction, and search engine optimization. Its business model also encompassed web marketing, web security, and fulfillment-related operations such as product photography, storage, and shipping.

A significant milestone for Aratana occurred in March 2015 when it was acquired by Start Today Co., Ltd., the operator of the major online fashion website ZOZOTOWN, becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary. At the time of the acquisition, Aratana had over 100 employees, mostly engineers, and had been involved in the development of more than 800 e-commerce sites in Japan. The partnership aimed to combine ZOZOTOWN's e-commerce operational know-how with Aratana's technology and support capabilities to expand their collective e-commerce business. In December 2019, it was announced that Aratana would be absorbed into ZOZO and ZOZO Technologies, with the process completing on April 1, 2020, at which point the Aratana corporate entity ceased to exist.

Keywords: e-commerce solutions, online store development, EC-CUBE, web marketing, digital creative, website construction, online shop support, Cagolab, fulfillment services, marketing support, system development, design production, ZOZO acquisition, Japanese e-commerce, retail technology