Setting up a Rakuten feed

UI update: The settings for Feeds and the Feeds steps have been redesigned! Some visuals and instructions may not be up-to-date.

For Rakuten, Channable offers the option to integrate your products with a Feed. In this article, we will guide you through the different steps of creating a Rakuten feed.

Step 1: Create a new Rakuten feed

1. Navigate to [Your project] > Channels.

2. Click +Create channel.

3. Search for "Rakuten" and select 'Rakuten'.

4. Next, fill in your Feed name

5. Select your Target country from the dropdown.

6. Select the Type of market, which is the specific category or sector of the retail market for your products.

7. Click on Advanced settings to edit more settings for your feed, such as Master rules

8. Once you have completed your feed settings, click Continue.

Note: We only offer France, Germany, and the UK for our Rakuten feed.

Step 2: Categories

Set up the Categories for your products by using the generate categories feature or create new categories from scratch.

Important: Our Rakuten feed works a little bit differently from our other feeds in that each market requires its own feed. When selecting the type of market you will need to categorize all products to that corresponding market type and exclude the others.

For example, if you have 5,000 items containing products that could be categorized under Beauty (Parfum / Soin / Beauté) and Fashion (Mode) you will need to set up a feed for each of these types of markets so you will have 2 feeds in total. You will also need to exclude all products that are not relevant to that category so that all products in that feed relate to the type of market you selected in settings. You can follow read this article about how to exclude products in your categories step.

Step 3: Rules and Mapping

Here you will be able to create different Rules to optimize your product data.

In the Mapping step, you will need to ensure that you match your data fields to all the blue fields which are presented as these are the mandatory fields required by the marketplace. If you do not provide data for the blue fields this will return errors from the marketplace. Orange and white fields are recommended and are not required for a successful upload.

For more detailed information about Rakuten's feed templates, you can visit their website.

Tip: For a description of the channel fields, hover over the gray question mark icons with your cursor.

Step 4: Preview & Quality

You have already created the feed, so now you just need to check it to make sure it is ready to go. In the Preview step, you will be able to check the feed and obtain the URL that you will have to integrate into your Rakuten account.

Note I: the URL will appear once you activate the feed and run it.

Note II: Previously, Rakuten fetched the URL file twice a day. Now, the URL file will be fetched every six hours, four times per day at 3h,9h,15h, and 21h respectively.

In the Quality step, you can check if Channable detects any information about any product that according to the specifications could be problematic. Remember that only the errors on the Mandatory level should cause your feed to not be accepted, so if you have some errors at the Recommended level, you can still upload your listing and it should work correctly.

Important: Although our system will detect any errors with your feed in the Preview step, you can get further feedback on your Feeds quality by validating your feed file following the advice in this article.