According to an email received by several merchants who have been in touch with Tamebay, Rakuten’s Play.com is no longer accepting new merchants onto the marketplace.
In both cases, the sellers had applied to become merchants and waited for several months for approval. Upon enquiring when they would be accredited they were informed that Play.com was no longer taking on new sellers.
One of the readers sent us the text of Play.com’s rejection email:
“Unfortunately we are no longer processing any new members onto the Play.com website, as our team are focussed upon the launch of our brand new Marketplace which is due to go live in October. We will be reviewing the tariff scheme for merchant and the new site will be more Merchant focussed.”
So, big changes are afoot at Rakuten that will have ramifications for both existing sellers on the Play.com site and those selling access to it.
As to what those plans are, is unknown to us. so if you have any information, do let us know.
7 Responses
Our account manager has been advising us of the changes coming and we were sent details of the plans yesterday, it’s marked confidential so not appropriate for me to share here.
Some exciting changes on the way though, it will be interesting to see it all roll out in time for Q4…
🙂
I wish they could have told me that straight up before i had to arse around with them for the last 4 months trying to figure out why they had’nt open my account!!
It’s great if there is a new marketplace, what I am not happy about is being a current seller on an ‘abandoned’ , I am guessing and I can see from the site it’s self that things are not being update etc, so driving sales to the current marketplace is probably not happening right now. However I have paid my fee’s upfront but not getting the attention that perhaps it should?
For example if you visit the jewellery category on the site now it shows an out of date banner for birth stone of the month in April!
I contacted our Play E-Commerce Consultant and this is what they said.
Hi Simon
Thanks for your email. The Play.com site will not be changing any api or spreadsheet functionality and you should be able to trade as normal. The launch of Rakuten.co.uk is planned for October this year but that should not affect your trading through Q4 on Play.com.
There will be the option to join the Rakuten.co.uk platform once it has lunched and there will be further communications on this in the near future from our merchant services team.
Thanks
Josh