The company behind Offra
Offra is a service of Rubik KK, a company in Shin-Yokohama that has spent the past ten years on the plumbing underneath online retail.
Ten years of product data
Rubik works in data feeds: the layer that turns a shop's catalogue into something a marketplace, a comparison site or an advertising platform can read and rank. It is unglamorous work and it is where the money in online retail is quietly won or lost — a feed with the wrong category, a stale price or a missing attribute costs a retailer real sales every day it stays that way. Several hundred engagements later, the pattern is familiar: the technology keeps getting more capable and harder to use, and someone has to stand between the two.
Why this company built Offra
Reverse sourcing is the same problem pointed the other way. A shop in Lyon or Chicago describes what it wants to buy — a category, a condition, a quantity, a budget — and the work is to put that description in front of the Japanese shops that actually hold the stock, in a form they can answer in minutes rather than in an afternoon of email. Matching a description to an inventory, keeping categories honest across two languages, knowing what a fair price looks like this month: that is feed work, and it is what this company has been doing since before Offra existed.
It is also why Offra is built the way it is. Prices are quoted by the seller in yen with nothing added on top, the platform's ten percent is visible in the amount the buyer accepts, and payment is held until the parcel actually ships. A marketplace that hides its economics has to be trusted; one that publishes them does not.
Company particulars
- Registered name
- Rubik KK
- Head office
- 3-7-18 Shin-Yokohama, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa 222-0033, Japan
- Representative
- Naoki Fujimoto
- Telephone
- 03-6869-6082 · Fax 03-6893-3931
- customer@rubik.co.jp
- Main banks
- Mizuho Bank, MUFG Bank
- Company website
- rubik.co.jp