plentymarkets are the latest third party channel management software solution to add support for Rakuten.co.uk.
plentymarkets emphasise that English markets attract a large number of customers because of the numerous English native speakers around the world and the even higher number of second-language speakers. The integration of Rakuten.co.uk allows you to reach these customers and to sell your items to this large audience.
An interface to Rakuten.de has already been available in plentymarkets for some time now and the two platforms are very similar. The plentymarkets interface to Rakuten is similar to other market interfaces and includes the usual steps steps such as defining a price column and linking categories. The settings are not very compicated and are easy to be carried out so that once you have registered, you can soon start selling on Rakuten.co.uk via plentymarkets.
We’re going to take a closer look at Rakuten.co.uk this week on Tamebay looking at how the marketplace has grown and an indepth look at how easy retailers are finding it to sign up. If you’ve any comments feel free to add them below or email me direct at [email protected]
2 Responses
We’ve now got around 4500 silver charms up on Rakuten UK and it was certainly a lot easier than Play.com
The only major thing that boiled my blood slightly was store categories. Like ebay you have Rakuten’s categories and then you can have your own store categories. In my flat file csv, I decided to use the same references as ebay so that way it would save me time. This is the internal reference.
There is NO Rakuten automated way to create store categories so I set up a script to do it for me based on our ebay category names. Apx 280 done.
What Rakuten DONT tell you is that you have to populate them ALL otherwise their checking team won’t take your store from staging to live.
This wasn’t too too bad but maybe I should have been less ambitious and started small got approval and then done what I wanted.
The next issue was the crazy one for me. I kept the category hierarchy the same as Ebay so a depth of 3 MAX.
An example would be
Silver charms – Animals – Cat charms.
I populated the cat charms category with cat charms. On ebay, you cannot have a category with products and another category.
On Rakuten they want you to populate ALL categories. So in the example above they want – required me to populate Silver charms AND animals AND cat charms.
I did reply to the helpful rep that that was a little silly, as my SILVER CHARMS category would have apx 6000 products and it would help a customer much more if when they click on the charms category they see the category tree more easily and could then choose what type of charm they wanted.
Eventually I had to work around it by adding to my csv file extra categories for the products so that ALL charms appear in the Charms category and then ALL animal charms appear in the Animals charms category and then cats in the cats category.
It did take some messing around but all works now.
I think we have been live for about a 2 weeks now but haven’t had a sale. (Early Days B-)) but when it was play.com we took no where near Amazon and Ebay, but it was worth while.
So my advice to anyone creating your categories would be.. Start small.. Wait for approval… Then when you aren’t being watched as much… Do what you want….
ttfn
Simon