There is a business norm in Japan that to attract more potential customers to trial their companies’ products and services, some aggressive companies such as Rakuten Group may frequently offer different marketing promotions. Sometimes, they offer an impressive amount of bonus points (1:1 cash bonus) to potential customers to use their services.
In this article, I am going to share with you my feelings after trying the Rakuten Market Service for your reference.
Let’s dive in.
Background: In July of 2020, I purchased an old model of a smartphone from Rakuten Mobile at Tokyo, the Ikebukuro branch. This is Aquos Sense3 lite. I bought it because it has a Japanese sim-card built-in system. On the other hand, I can enjoy the free service plan of one-year mobile Wi-Fi and with no penalty applied contract.
Nine months later, about March of 2021, I received a mobile message one morning that reminded me the due date of my bonus cash was nearby. I logged into my account and I noticed that the bonus cash amount was dramatically more than usual and it became an impressive amount of 23,500 from a few hundred!
An unexpected increased amount of bonus
Since I have no such bingo bonus experience before, I doubted if that is true! I decided to order something on Rakuten Market and settled by using those bonus cash.
I bet that is the way they direct customers to trial their Rakuten Market service!
There is a cliche telling us that we should not have over expectations on inexpensive service especially in Japan, a country who strives for fair trades and Rakuten is a company group who is famous in ‘Reasonable’ price offering for their product services.
Not able to see the photo of searched items
According to my previous searching experiences on other shopping markets such as Amazon or Yahoo mall, their searching systems are very effective and user friendly, easy to search and read information without hesitation. However, it seems I gained a different experience with Rakuten’s system. I doubt that if they have too many bugs on the system, why does no product photos pop up properly with information? After a few trials on my phone application, I gave up because it is too tiring for me to keep trying. I switched to my computer and luckily my laptop worked and finally I read all the photos and product information there!
The search engine of system’s application was not in function
Every time I use the search engine, I feel like it is a patient test for me because I receive a message of ‘unknown or no result’ from the search result sometimes and I don’t know why. However, it is interesting to know that the product that I searched for is actually a popular item and it is very weird to have that ‘no result’ message pop up.
I doubt the effectiveness of the search engine, therefore, I switched to google platform to double check. After searching for the product name, I copied it and pasted the full product name in the search bar again for searching, lucky me that the input words finally can be recognized by the system and it rolled me the product information that I needed!
The price of Rakuten Market’s products
There is another cliche telling us that before people make a deal they usually shop around for the best one. Last time, I compared the price with Yahoo shopping mall and Amazon. I found that most of the time the products that I searched in Rakuten Market, the prices were comparatively higher than the above two shopping markets. According to my last experience, each product has at least has 1,000 yen difference, except some brands of rice and medicine.
Since I did not think that those are the unique products for the Rakuten market, I really wonder why they set the profit margin that high?
Do they have AI added-in their Order Management System?
After consolidating my purchase list, I want to finish my order input asap. However, I found that there is no button of ‘proceed to checkout’ at the layout page of my laptop.
In order to confirm if this was a problem with my laptop, or there are system bugs on their PO system, I gave my laptop a warm boot, however, there was no difference as last time. I gradually became impatient, so I quickly switched back to my smartphone application and tried to finish the order input there.
When I processed the order input, it blocked me again by the PO system. The reason said I was not allowed to buy too many goods at one time!
I did not understand but I listed down my items from 10 to 5 without choices. When I input my order, I know that the amount should be over a bit more than the bonus cash total, and I know I will need to settle extra by my credit card. However, under the super strict regulation of the PO system, I had to separate my order into two and settle the balance payment in the second one.
Be honest, I didn’t enjoy any moment of using their online system; even though I finished my order input, I still wonder if my order has been processed well? However, if you like to obtain easy bonus points for cash redemption, Rakuten really helps.
This article was first published on 15.11.2021
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