Qoo10 Brand Guidelines: Gmarket’s Founder, eBay, Qoo10 Japan and a 2024 Wind-Up

A Korean founder and an eBay joint venture.

Qoo10 grew out of Korean e-commerce. Its founder, Ku Young-bae, created Gmarket, one of South Korea’s early online marketplaces, and sold it to eBay in 2009, The Asia Business Daily reported in 2023. The paper said the sale agreement barred him from competing in Korean e-commerce for ten years, and that in 2010 he set up Qoo10 in Singapore through a joint venture with eBay. TechCrunch gave the same outline in 2015: Qoo10 was founded in 2010 as a joint venture between the Gmarket founder and eBay, after eBay had struggled to enter Japan and China. The Straits Times described the company in December 2024 as Singapore-based and founded in 2010.

The joint venture was called Giosis. Its sites originally traded under the Gmarket name; English Wikipedia says they were renamed Qoo10 in May 2012. By July 2015, TechCrunch reported, Giosis ran Qoo10 marketplaces in Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong and China, alongside a messaging app, QTalk, through which shoppers earned points. That year the company also brought in Singapore Press Holdings, the newspaper publisher, as an investor and partner on advertising and classifieds, the same report said.

Qoo10 worked as a marketplace rather than a retailer: independent merchants listed goods on its sites, and the company ran the payment services through which they were paid. That role became central to its later history in Singapore.

Japan to eBay, the rest toward Korea.

In February 2018 eBay announced that it was buying Giosis’ Japan business, including the Qoo10.jp site, and giving up its investment in Giosis’ businesses outside Japan, ZDNet reported. The publication noted that eBay’s stake in Giosis dated back to 2010, when the joint venture was set up to run localised marketplaces across Asia. The two halves then went separate ways under the same name.

The Japanese site stayed with eBay. In December 2025 The Asia Business Daily described eBay Japan as the company operating Qoo10 Japan, and reported that it was holding the inaugural Qoo10 Japan Mega Beauty Awards in Tokyo, with winners chosen partly by more than 540,000 consumer votes, partly by sales on the site and partly by make-up artists and beauty creators. Votes were cast over 14 days from 1 October 2025, and the awards covered 137 products across grand-prize, category and special awards, in fields from skincare and base make-up to hair and fragrance, the paper said. The same report said eBay Japan had staged a beauty festival, Mega Cosme Land, in Tokyo in October 2025 with 51 Korean beauty brands, and ran a delivery service, Kan-Dash, for goods shipped from Korea to Japanese customers within three to five days. Earlier in 2025, the paper said, eBay Japan had presented its approach to Korean beauty at a K-Beauty Mega Conference in March and started a Mega Debut programme for newer Korean brands.

The non-Japanese business moved back toward Korea. In April 2023 Qoo10 acquired WeMakePrice, its third Korean e-commerce acquisition after TMON and Interpark Commerce, The Asia Business Daily reported; Qoo10 bought all the WeMakePrice shares held by Wonder Holdings, together with management rights and ownership of its mobile app. Inside Korea, the paper added, Qoo10 had until then worked mainly in cross-border, direct-purchase shopping. It said Qoo10 then ran seven localised platforms in five countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and China, and had a logistics affiliate, Qxpress, with bases in 19 locations across 11 countries.

Platforms and storefronts.

Southeast Asia’s e-commerce platforms present themselves first through their apps. The home screen of a marketplace carries its name, a run of category icons, banners for the current sale and links to payments, top-ups and delivery services, and that screen does much of the work a shop front once did. Tokopedia, which English Wikipedia says took its name from the Indonesian word for “shop” and the word “encyclopedia,” and Bukalapak, whose name means “open a market stall,” both chose plain Indonesian words that describe what the service does.

Shopping-festival dates and partner programmes carry much of the identity beyond the app. Date-named sales, celebrity brand ambassadors and seasonal campaigns appear on the platforms’ own pages and in the local press; Indonesian Wikipedia records Tokopedia’s ambassadors from 2014 onwards. Programmes for small shops, such as Mitra Tokopedia and Mitra Bukalapak for family-run warungs, take the platform name off the screen and onto counters, signs and receipts.

For Vietnam’s retailers — phone and electronics chains, grocery chains and supermarket groups — the store fascia is a public face alongside the app and the website, and the companies’ corporate pages set out their store formats, sister banners and owners. Store counts and formats in this guide are given only as a dated source reports them.

Corporate pages and the press also carry the ownership story, which in this region often changes the brand itself. Tokopedia merged with Gojek into GoTo in May 2021, TechCrunch reported, and in 2024 it took in TikTok Shop’s Indonesian business, while Bukalapak listed in Jakarta in August 2021 and ended its physical-goods marketplace in early 2025. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — founders, owners, listings and mergers — and says plainly when a fact rests only on the company’s own word.

One name, two outcomes.

The Korean expansion ended in insolvency. From early July 2024, TMON and WeMakePrice failed to make payments to merchants on their platforms, and both filed for corporate rehabilitation in the Seoul Bankruptcy Court, the Business Times reported. The Straits Times added that the unpaid seller payouts dated from May and that traders then left both platforms as complaints piled up. In Singapore, merchants on the Qoo10 site also faced delayed payouts and complained to the Monetary Authority of Singapore and other agencies between April and August 2024, the Straits Times reported. The Monetary Authority of Singapore then directed Qoo10 in September 2024 to suspend all payment services, saying the company could not give sufficient assurance that it had the resources and systems to meet its payment obligations to merchants on time. On 11 November 2024 the Singapore High Court found Qoo10 insolvent and ordered it to be wound up, appointing liquidators from AAG Corporate Advisory to take over the management of the company, the Business Times reported.

The result is a name with two lives. The Singapore company that built Qoo10 across Southeast Asia is in liquidation, and its marketplace no longer trades as it did. Qoo10 Japan, run by eBay Japan since the 2018 deal, continued to operate, with The Asia Business Daily reporting its Tokyo beauty awards in December 2025. Any reader who meets the name today should check which Qoo10 is meant: the Japanese site is a separate business with a separate owner.

For a design guide, Qoo10 shows how a short invented marketplace name can travel across borders and outlast the company that coined it. Compare Shopee, another marketplace that grew from Singapore, and Zalora, a fashion platform from the same years in the same region. For this guide we use a berry red, plum ink and blush with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Qoo10’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.