In South Korea, Naver takes the top place as the country’s top local search engine with over 70 percent market share. Initially, Daum led in the Korean market with its successful launch of Daum Café. However, Naver quickly acquired the lion’s share in the market with its wide range of services, including Naver Café, Naver Pay, Naver Blog, Naver Map, news, online shopping, email, etc.
Online Shopping Platform
Thanks to its digital wallet service, Naver’s “Smartstore” became South Korea’s top online shopping service last year. Smartstore made almost 20.9 trillion won ($17.2 billion) worth of payment transactions in 2019, according to mobile market research company Wiseapp.
Established in 2012, the online shopping service connects customers and retailers, and in the last five years, the platform has seen its popularity rise. Through Naver Pay, Naver offers massive shopping reward points for shoppers using the digital wallet platform. Customers could use the rewards the next time they go online shopping or in Naver’s other services, such as online music and entertainment.
Due to the COVID-10 pandemic, Naver’s online shopping gained further traction as consumers stayed at home, and orders for daily necessities skyrocketed. Currently, Smartstore has over 800 million items and about 3.2 million retailers using the platform to sell items.
Search Engine Tool
Unlike Google’s minimalistic style, the Naver homepage covers a lot of information covering a wide range of topics such as news, weather reports, fashion, shopping, music, blogs, webtoons, and other Naver services.
Naver’s search engine results page (SERP) contains a wide range of information and search categories showing Naver’s specific services, including Naver Café and Blogs.
The search tool allows users to filter their searches based on specific criteria such as filtering results within a particular time, relevance, timeliness, keywords, and other advanced searches. Like Google, the arrangement of the categories change depending on the users’ historical search behavior data and search terms.
Additionally, Naver’s trending search box shows results from a rank of top trends for a specific duration. The search box could also provide subjects based on the keyword the user searches, and display multiple trending searches lists.
Membership Program
In June, Naver launched its Naver Plus membership program to strengthen businesses based on Naver Pay infrastructure. Naver Pay is the second mobile payment created by Naver after Line Pay. The company hopes to boost businesses and their services through the program.
Users could avail of the Naver Plus Membership for a monthly subscription fee of 4,900 won (around $4) acquiring reward points for transactions made via Naver Pay or Naver Bankbook. Sellers from Naver’s services could also avail of the membership making their product more prominent in search results, which would then allow customers to receive more pay points for the products they buy.
Through the system, the company expects to create an e-commerce ecosystem where both customers and sellers benefit from Naver’s shopping service. The membership program would also boost the company’s relatively weak content.
Naver Korean Dictionary & Translate
The Naver translator app is one of the first Korean translator apps available through the internet. Naver developed the app delivering the most accurate and complete Korean-English and English-Korean translator.
The translator is also one of the most used apps with various instructions to help learn its usage. The homepage features grammar tips, idioms, words-of-the-day, as well as daily Korean conversations. Along with each translation comes a variety of model sentences utilizing sentence structures and keywords to create an effective learning experience.
The app also lets users record their voice and then transcribes and delivers instant written translations of your speech.
