Two different shapes of marketplace
Amazon organizes much of its marketplace around a shared catalog: many sellers can offer the same product through one product detail page. Rakuten Ichiba is described as a mall of independent shops, in which each shop lists and presents its own item pages. This is a simplification, and both marketplaces have exceptions, but it explains why a seller who moves between them must change what they pay attention to.
What this means for placement
On a catalog-first marketplace, the main question is often whether you share the right product page and win the offer on it. On Rakuten, the question is more about your own item page: the genre it sits in, the tags it carries, its title and description, and the shop around it. The genre structure is published through Rakuten’s Genre Search API and your placement is yours to choose, which makes it both an opportunity and a responsibility.
Option 1 — Copy your listing across unchanged
It is fast and keeps your catalog consistent. The trade-off is that titles, attributes and categories written for one marketplace may not match how Rakuten shoppers search or how Rakuten organizes genres. Use this only as a first draft, and plan to review genre and tags item by item.
Option 2 — Rebuild your top products for Rakuten
Choose your best sellers and rebuild their genre, tags and descriptions from the Rakuten shopper’s point of view. It costs time but gives a clear test: you can compare the rebuilt products with the untouched ones over the same period. This is the option most closely supported by the workflow in the book.
Option 3 — Build a separate Rakuten catalog layer
Keep one master catalog and add a Rakuten-specific layer that stores the genre ID, tags and wording for each product. It is the most work to set up and the easiest to keep consistent when you have many products. The Placement Command Center helps you hold these details in one place.
A short example
A shop sells hand-made leather wallets on several marketplaces. On the catalog-first marketplace, its wallets share product pages with similar items, so the work is mostly about the offer. On Rakuten, each wallet needs its own genre and tags, written for shoppers who may browse a wallet genre or filter by material. The owner chooses option 2 for the five best sellers, checks the genre path of close competitors, records the changes and compares a fair period before deciding whether to extend the work.
Choosing between them
If you have fewer than twenty products, option 2 is usually enough. If you have hundreds and sell on several marketplaces, option 3 pays for itself. Option 1 should be a stopgap. Whichever you choose, change a small batch first, record the date and compare a fair period, because neither marketplace publishes its full ranking formula and you should not assume that results from one will repeat on the other.
Do not carry over habits that do not fit
Do not assume that the rules or tools you know from another marketplace exist on Rakuten under the same name. Programs such as Super Point Up (SPU), Rakuten’s points program for shoppers, and tools such as R-Karte, Rakuten’s shop analytics area, belong to Rakuten’s own system, and their details are defined by Rakuten and can change.
Next steps
Read how Rakuten genre and tag structure works for the background, then diagnose your own shop and follow the genre and tag optimization workflow before you change any listing. The complete book page explains what the book and the workspace include, and the book overview lists the 20 categories.
Sources and verification
Last reviewed 4 October 2026. Rakuten changes its genre structure, search features and Rakuten Merchant Server (RMS) tools from time to time. What follows describes the pages as published by Rakuten at the time of writing, which may change. Always rely on the current wording in your own RMS account and on the official pages below before you act.
Educational guide only. Not legal, tax or financial advice. Independent of, and not affiliated with or endorsed by, Rakuten. No ranking, traffic or sales result is guaranteed.