Rakuten, a leading e-commerce company in Japan, is going to join the ranks of mobile point-of-sale providers. According to a report from The Next Web, the company will be offering Smartpay to Japanese small businesses to let them accept credit and debit cards using their smartphones.

Like other mPOS solutions, Smartpay combines a card-reading attachment for a smartphone with an applicaton to process transactions. Merchants pay a percentage of the transaction for use of the product. In the case of Smartpay, Rakuten is charging a hefty 4.9 percent, more than 2 percentage points higher than comparable solutions in the U.S.

As for competitors, Japan is one of the countries where PayPal is offering its competitive PayPal Here product. It's working with Japanese bank Softbank to distribute its mobile POS solution.

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