Rakuten.co.uk (Play.com as was) launched a few weeks back and we’ve been wondering how they will be attracting and retaining new buyers. It’s a crowded market out there and it’s hard to get cut-through and lure in customers.
But we have a bit of an answer in a promo they have revealed. They say: “Our brand new Marketplace has arrived and to celebrate, we have extended and improved our promotional offer until the 30th of November 2014. We are offering you a fantastic reward when you buy from any of our stores. Spend £20 or more and get £5 back in Rakuten Super Points to spend on your next purchase with us. You will earn Super Points with everything you buy on Rakuten.co.uk so start shopping and saving today.”
You can read about the Super Points promo and find full details here.
It’s not a bad little offer. But the real problem is that right now there is very little on Rakuten to buy so you can bag your Super Points.
This is the challenge with the launch of any new ecommerce site. It’s hard to get that virtuous circle going whereby you have sellers chasing buyers and buyers coming back for more.
Have you taken the plunge yet on the new Rakuten.co.uk marketplace and started selling? And if you have, have you enjoyed any success?
Tamebay’s position remains the same. Stick to what you’re doing this Christmas on Amazon, eBay and elsewhere. It’s unlikely you will get much return on efforts on Rakuten in the next few weeks and you’ll be busy anyway. The time to consider new horizons is in the New Year when the Rakuten offering might become more attractive. Until then, focussing valuable time and resources on current activities is the sensible path.
10 Responses
We still haven’t been contacted, we still paid our subscription fees just before the re-launch and change, our sales on play have fallen off the edge of a cliff and we certainly won’t be making back what we spent on the subscription fees!
Not a great start and not sure if we want to even sell on there after the way they have treated sellers.
Part of our business sells Christmas decorations and we worked with Play quite a bit last year on promotions. As it currently stands on Rakuten we stock more Christmas lines than the entire marketplace, so have they missed a trick but not asking the right merchants at the right time?
Bathrooms. Showing 1 – 20 of 278 Results.
That’s it.
Not even a remotely serious proposition.
Rakuten would have to pay me to list.
Just a simple reflection. I visited the site for the first time today and looked at some of the prices and thought, that looks expensive so I did a totally random check of prices quoted against the same product on Amazon, non were in the same ballpark, all were more expensive. It seems to me this won’t help matters as folk are getting increasingly savvy about shopping around.
no serious seller will be on rakuten until inventory management programs like linnworks support them and even then will it be worth it? i sell media tems and i got a handful of sales through priceminister which is owned by rakuten last year, i ended up just dumping the channel (Even Ebid out performed it for me!)
Rakuten seem like a company with more money than sense to me , i just dont get it even if they put a minimum effort into play.com it would have remained a viable marketplace
its a pity a company like the Hut didnt get control of play..
Can’t find any of the Xmas prezzies I need on Rakuten. eBay it is then!
I’m not a seller on Rakuten but I’m someone more important: A POTENTIAL CUSTOMER!
However, the site in its current state is utterly crap. Dreadful layout, woeful search facilities that either return endless amounts of the same item or nothing at all, no information on any of the products, loads of old products appearing high up on every page with newer items hidden away, you can’t sort by anything useful like alphabetical order, etc, etc…
It looks like a generic fake site that you often find using Google’s shopping search. It’ll DIE ON ITS ARSE if the “geniuses” in Japan don’t wake up and smell the saké soon. Their “one size fits all” model ain’t gonna work.
Basically, there is so much wrong with the site at the moment that I can’t even be bothered to try and find anything worth using my £5 off a £10 spend voucher.