Gmarket Brand Guidelines: Goodsdaq 2000, eBay, Shinsegae & an Alibaba Joint Venture

An Interpark spin-off that became an open market.

Gmarket is a South Korean online marketplace, an “open market” in Korean retail usage: a platform on which independent sellers list goods for buyers. English Wikipedia says its predecessor was set up in 1999 by Ku Young-bae inside the online auction company Interpark. In 2000 it was spun off as a website of its own under the name Goodsdaq, and in 2003 it was renamed Gmarket. Korean Wikipedia likewise dates the business to 1999 as an Interpark subsidiary, and The Korea Times wrote in 2021 that Gmarket had launched its open-market service in 1999.

According to English Wikipedia, Gmarket listed its shares on the Nasdaq in New York in 2006, the same year it opened a global website with product listings in English. In 2009 the American marketplace company eBay bought it, acquiring shares from Interpark and Yahoo, and the stock was then delisted. English Wikipedia describes a model in which sellers handle and ship the goods themselves and pay the platform fees and advertising charges, with public buyer feedback used to rate sellers. Its listings span collectibles, household appliances, computers, furniture and equipment, among other goods, the same article says.

Korean Wikipedia says Gmarket merged in 2011 with Auction, eBay’s other Korean marketplace, and that the combined business is run by a company named Gmarket, with its head office in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Under eBay the Korean arm traded as eBay Korea, which ran three marketplaces, Gmarket, Auction and G9, The Korea Times reported in November 2021.

A G on green, then a gradient to blue.

For most of its life Gmarket’s logo was a letter G on a green ground, The Korea Times reported in March 2021. That year eBay Korea reworked the shopping app around a new brand identity. It added blue to the green and joined the two with a gradient, making them the platform’s two key colours. The company tied the new logo to four words, “Center,” “Connection,” “Variety” and “Forward,” and named “connection” as the keyword for the service, describing Gmarket as the link between customers and products and between customers themselves.

The same overhaul brought a house typeface. Gmarket changed the type in its app to Gmarket Sans, a font the company developed, and made it available for anyone, sellers and customers included, to use without restriction, the paper reported. Icons and motion were redrawn with simple shapes so that they would read inside a small icon box; animation was added to the search window and to the screens shown while order and payment details load; and the home page was cut back to a larger search bar with content shaped by each shopper’s interests. A navigation bar gave direct access to Smile Club, the membership service, and to recently viewed products.

An eBay Korea official described the approach to The Korea Times as an “Atomic Design System”: interface components are defined from the smallest unit, combined into modules, and the modules combined into the pages customers see, so that the brand identity and usability stay consistent. The “Smile” name runs through the platform’s promotions as well. At a press event at COEX in Gangnam in October 2025, the company set out plans around Big Smile Day, its large sale event, the Asia Business Daily reported.

Screens, boxes and bookshops.

South Korea’s online marketplaces present themselves first through their apps. When eBay Korea reworked Gmarket in 2021, The Korea Times reported, the change ran from the logo and a company-made typeface to icons, loading animations and a simpler home screen built around a larger search bar. In 2022 11st carried its new gradient logo onto its app icon, its in-app banners and its “buy” button, the Munhwa Ilbo reported.

Several platforms now publish their design rules. 11st opened a public design-system website in 2024, with logo rules, a house typeface and guidance on colour, grids and icons, according to the design magazine Design Compass, while Gmarket made its Gmarket Sans typeface free for anyone to use. Naming tends to be plain and descriptive. “Open market” is the usual Korean term for a platform on which independent sellers list goods, and membership schemes and sale days carry their own names, such as Gmarket’s Smile Club.

The bookshop chains in this group work across screens and shop floors alike, so their identities reach from websites and apps to delivery boxes, flagship bookshops, reading lounges and campaign graphics. Each guide describes those materials only as the companies themselves publish them, or as dated press reports describe them, and names platforms and stores in the form the companies use in English.

Ownership is part of the story across the sector. Gmarket passed from Interpark to eBay, then to Shinsegae, and into a joint venture with Alibaba; 11st moved between SK companies and outside investors before becoming a subsidiary of SK Planet at the end of 2025. Each guide sets out founders, owners and stock-market listings as dated facts from corporate pages, official registers and independent press, and marks clearly what rests only on a company’s own word.

From eBay to Shinsegae and Alibaba.

eBay sold control of its Korean business to E-Mart, the discount-store company of the Shinsegae retail group. The agreement for an 80 percent stake was signed in June 2021, and The Korea Times reported that Shinsegae had completed all the procedures for the acquisition as of 15 November 2021. At first, the paper wrote, the group would run eBay Korea and its own platform, SSG.com, as separate businesses while sharing fulfilment centres. In June 2024 Shinsegae appointed a former Alibaba Korea executive as Gmarket’s chief executive, The Korea Herald reported; the same month Shinsegae signed a delivery partnership with CJ Logistics, the parcel company, as part of its online push.

On 26 December 2024 Shinsegae and the Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba announced a 50:50 joint venture, tentatively called Grand Opus Holdings, to hold Gmarket and AliExpress Korea, The Korea Herald reported. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission approved the combination on conditions on 18 September 2025, requiring the two platforms to keep domestic consumer data separate, and the two marketplaces were to keep operating independently under one roof, Inside Retail Asia reported. Gmarket became a subsidiary of the joint venture that day, according to the Asia Business Daily. In August 2026 the same paper reported that Shinsegae’s subsidiary Apollo Korea had contributed all of its Gmarket shares in exchange for half of the venture, since renamed Age Global Holdings, with Shinsegae and Alibaba as joint controllers and Gmarket and AliExpress Korea as its subsidiaries. James Jang became Gmarket’s chief executive in a Shinsegae reshuffle at the end of September 2025.

For a design guide, Gmarket shows how a marketplace can keep one letter and one colour family through several owners, and how a free house typeface can carry a brand beyond its own app. Compare Coupang, its Seoul rival, and 11st, another open market that grew up inside a larger company. For this guide we use a market green, a deep blue and a mist grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Gmarket’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.