Decide whether placement is even the suspect
A product can be hard to find for many reasons: weak titles, price, images, stock, reviews, shipping terms, seasonality, or a shift in demand. Genre and tag placement is only one of them. Start by writing down the symptom in plain words: which product, since when, which numbers moved (visits, impressions, orders), and what changed in the days before. Pull the figures from your own RMS reports, the shop-management data Rakuten provides to merchants, and note the date range you used.
If nothing about the symptom points to discoverability, stop here. Editing genres or tags to fix a price or stock problem wastes time and can create new problems.
Look up the genre you are actually in
Every Ichiba product is assigned a genre, and Rakuten’s Genre Search API describes the genre structure by Genre ID, with genreId=0 meaning the root. Even without using the API, you can open the product in your RMS item screen and write down the full genre path, from the top level to the final genre, together with its ID. Record the same for the product’s closest siblings in your own catalog.
Ask a simple question: if a shopper looked for this item by browsing from the top level, would this path be a place they would reasonably go? Write the honest answer down, even if it is “not sure”.
Compare with neighbors, not with your hopes
Use the shopper site to search for the product the way a shopper would, then note which genres the visible competing items sit in. The Item Search API documentation describes searching by keyword and narrowing results by genre or shop, and an option that returns the number of items in each genre; the same idea can be done by hand for a handful of products. Count how often the same genre appears for similar items.
The pattern matters more than any single result. If most close matches share one genre and yours sits elsewhere, that is evidence of a possible mismatch. If neighbors are scattered across many genres, the evidence is weak and you should not force a move.
Check the tags and the words around them
Placement is more than the genre. List the tags attached to the product, together with the tag IDs where your RMS screens show them (the identifiers Rakuten uses for tags, which matters when you work with Rakuten tag data as a seller), the words in its title and the words in its description. Compare them with the words you would use to describe the product to a friend and with those shoppers use in their searches. Mark tags that are missing, tags that are too broad to mean anything and tags that do not describe the item at all.
Keep this list factual. The goal of diagnosis is a short, dated table, not a rewrite.
Rule other causes in or out
Before you conclude that the genre is wrong, check the other usual suspects against the same period: did the price change, did stock run out, did a campaign end, did a competitor launch, did a seasonal peak pass? Rakuten’s own campaign and point programs, such as Super Point Up (SPU), the points program that rewards shoppers across Rakuten services, can shift shopper attention without any change to your listing.
Write one line for each cause with the words “ruled in”, “ruled out” or “unknown”. A diagnosis with an honest “unknown” is worth more than a confident guess.
Keep a clean evidence file
For each product you investigate, save the date, the genre path and ID, the tags, the report figures, screenshots of the relevant pages and your list of ruled-in and ruled-out causes. This file lets you measure a change later, and it lets a colleague or Rakuten support understand what you saw if you ever need to ask a question.
Common mistakes to avoid
Moving many products at once, so you cannot tell which change helped. Copying a competitor’s genre without checking that the product is really the same kind of item. Adding unrelated popular tags to borrow attention, which is misleading and can work against you. Changing the genre and the title and the price on the same day. Judging the result after two days instead of a full, comparable period.
What to do next
When you have a short list of products where placement looks like the cause, follow the genre and tag optimization workflow to correct them one step at a time. Understand the background with how Rakuten genre and tag structure works. Each step has matching categories in the book overview, and the Placement Command Center keeps your details filled in as you go; see the complete book page for what is included.
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.