In order to publish an item on Rakuten you simply have to go to your Shopify product page, click on "More actions" then "Rakuten - Edit Product"



A modal will appear allowing you to edit your Rakuten item information and publish your product.


Availability

If your product is not available to the Rakuten sales channel you will see the following banner:



Press "Make available" to enable the product. You will not be able to publish an item if it is unavailable to the sales channel.


Product Information


This section allows you to enter your title, description and catchcopy that will be displayed on your Rakuten item page.  If you need help translating your copy you can click on "Google translate".  The translation service will translate any text input you have entered.  If none is available, the Shopify fields (title/description/description for mobile phones) will be used. 


Please note that machine dependent characters are treated differently. Find here for more information




Advanced Fields


You can click on Expand under Advanced Fields for more product customization actions

After SKU migration, there are couple of fields no longer available in Product customization but available on Variant customization (below). There are a few customization restrictions here:

  1. Description by Sales Method: Has to follow the same rule as product description above for length restriction and HTML tags supported. Machine dependent characters such as (Roman Numerals) will take up more spaces/lengths. Refer to this guide for machine dependent characters
  2. Limited Password: Has to be within 32 characters and only contains alphanumeric. Cannot be checked while Enable Restock are set on all variants
  3. Product Detail Sell Type: If Detail Sell Type is Reserved, Release Date has to be provided. Date cannot be in the past and within 365 days from the date you start configuring this.
  4. Product Point: used when you want to configure point bonus during specific time. 
    1. Point Rate has to be between 2-20 points. 
    2. Bonus point event has to start no earlier than 2 hours from now and ends no later than 60 days from now. 
    3. If any of the variant's price is lesser than 100, point bonus event setting isn't allowed
  5. Hide From Search cannot be set while Enable Restock is set on all variants

Genre

A genre is the naming of product categories available in Rakuten.  Each product must have a genre associated with it in order to be published.



Default genre attributes


Certain genre will now be associated with attributes such as Color, Brand Name etc. after SKU migration. These fields could either be


  1. A number that you can enter
  2. A text that you can enter and click Add. See Color
  3. A suggestion that you can filter and pick from Available options. See Representative Color
  4. A suggestion that you can filter, pick from Available options or manually enter your own. See Brand name.


For #4, we cannot guarantee any value you enter into the field can be published to Rakuten. Therefore, it is recommended to pick from Available Options


 

Variant Options


In order to handle multiple variants, the Rakuten sales channel requires you to translate each option name.  The appropriate translated name will appear on the product title in Rakuten. (e.g. Grey Shirt - Blue - Small).  To help you with translating, you can press the "Google translate" button.


The following image shows a Shopify product with two variant options of Size (small, medium, and large) and Color (Blue, Green).


Product Photos

This section allows you to upload custom photos that will be used on your Rakuten Ichiba product page.


Things to note:

  • The order of images is determined by the placement of images from left to right.  To re-arrange images just drag and drop images to their preferred order.
  • To upload your Shopify photos, click on the "My photos meet these requirements." checkbox
  • Images uploaded here are applied across all variants
  • To have a separate image per variant, set the image on the Shopify Product page.


Rakuten Ichiba have set image requirements for their listings.  Please follow their guidelines when uploading images.



Default Prices

To simplify pricing across all of the variants you can set values in the "Default prices" section.  Setting the price, tax, and shipping fields means that these values will get applied across all variants unless specified in the "Variant specific" section.

As prices are entered, help text will show up converting your ¥ amount to your store currency.



Variant Specifics

If your Shopify product has variants then all possible options are shown in this section.  This section will allow you to specify individual price, tax, or shipping costs that are only applicable to that variant. After SKU migration, variants specific setting will have more information that can be set



If you scroll over to the right, you will see more options


There are few restrictions on the new settings on variants

  1. SKU: show the current merchant defined SKU Id from Shopify. Edit this field by edit Shopify variant's SKU. See the section below on how to do it.
  2. Required attributes / Optional attributes: This will override the Default attribute options. There are some fields being disabled because the values must be unified (can only be edit in Default attribute options)
  3. Catalog Id: No longer available. Instead, use Genre Attributes
  4. Order Limit: Has to be a number between 1 and 4


Edit Shopify Variant SKU


In Shopify Product detail UI, scroll down to Variants 

Click to your desired variant to be edited. Enter SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) and Save


Wait for a bit and you will see that your product in Rakuten has been updated with new SKU


Publishing

Once complete push "Publish".  Your listings are now in Publishing status and in a few moment your items will be for sale on Rakuten Ichiba.


Congrats!! You're now selling on Rakuten


To view your item on Rakuten Ichiba bring up the "Rakuten - Edit Product" modal and scroll to the bottom.  Each published variant will have a link to the Rakuten item page.