At its bi-annual merchant Expo in Paris yesterday, Rakuten’s Play.com revealed strong merchant growth with over 3,800 merchants trading across all platforms, 800 new merchants signed up since the dedicated marketplace launched in November last year and over 300 merchants who have created own-branded virtual shop fronts.
Shoppers through Rakuten’s Play.com can now browse more product categories than ever before, with sales for fashion and clothing soaring 130% and DVD up 120% and CD categories up 157% over the last two quarters. Listings on Rakuten’s Play.com dedicated marketplace, which launched six months ago now exceed 30 million, up 40% year on year.
At launch Rakuten’s Play.com was the first marketplace to offer customisable shopfronts to retailers enabling over merchants to tailor their digital stores to their brand. Another unique merchant feature that has seen significant uptake is Rakuten Mail, a unique direct mail service to customers that allows Rakuten’s Play.com merchants to tailor special offers and marketing promotions to their own customer base, a service that saw 300% usage uplift in April alone.
Adam Stewart, Director of Marketing at Rakuten’s Play.com commented: “Rakuten’s Play.com is a virtual shopping community with the footfall of a bustling high street online. Our goal is to share our relationship with customers with our merchants to empower them to create the best shopping experience for everyone. We’re delighted with the response to our new services from both merchants and customers, and look forward to even greater results in the future.”
Supported by a fast growing team of E-Commerce Consultants, merchant results from the crucial golden quarter in the run up to Christmas show sales through the marketplace were up 80% year on year. In addition to branded shop fronts and Rakuten Mail, merchants can also tap into live webinars with tips on how to optimise retail sales.
You can learn more about retail features provided by Rakuten’s Play.com marketplace or to find out how to become a marketplace merchant on the Rakuten website. You’ll also be able to meet the Rakuten team at ChannelAdvisor Catalyst on the 3rd an 4th of June.
4 Responses
It is nice to see Rakuten bubbling up with expansion and boasting millions of sellers.
Can I just what is the lead time for listing new product which is not on Rakuten Play compared to that of Amazon and eBay ?
[ note: its terribly long ]
They ought to sort this out by now !
I attended the Rakutan (Play.com) Expo last week in London, and they announced that they had a seller had succsesfully beta tested the upload of the Private Listing file to put new products (products that are not in the core catalogue) on to Rakutan.
A discussion with a Rakutan Representative after the presentation led me to believe that this process will be available to marketplace sellers by the end of the month!!
The main fallout of the presentation was the question from the floor “What constitutes a Private Listing” which i personally feel was not answered properly as it seems that instead of listing against an item in the Core Catalogue, sellers can create private listings that no one else can list against, which has its place, however to me that the overall catalogue may get a lot of duplications.
Rakutan said they will police this when it starts going live.
Lee
This seems like a good viable alternative market for any online retailer. When we first started on Amazon sales were SLOW and not its fantastic for us.
I would think a similar effort on play would also pay off in the long run.
The shops seems clean and simple and look great. Although all a little the same
Although the customization features of stores on ebay are greater, its no thanks to ebay it was essentially a hack. So i cant give them credit for it.