Rakuten advertising review – perspective or challenge?

Many of us probably heard about Rakuten advertising and publishing services and affiliate marketing. It seems an attractive offer to start an affiliate marketing business. However, from our experience, there are a lot of drawbacks to Rakuten advertising. Of course, we do not want you to discourage to pick this affiliate service and it’s up to you to decide. Maybe someone makes a great profit from Rakuten advertising and is very happy with that. So, let’s dive into Rakuten advertising review. Here, we will share our unbiased experience.

First, what falls in sight is problems with logging in and out to your Rakuten account. If you try to change the password or log-in after some time to your account, you will always get errors.

Old password:

New password:

This is very confusing, looks unprofessional and unreliable. The worst part is that this error is repeating constantly.

Second, there is no 2FA or authenticator security layer. It is a very important feature nowadays to protect your account from unauthorized attempts to hack your account.

Third, the website seems to be buggy because, as mentioned, password changing does not work properly, the log-in page jams and basically you cannot log-in. The support does not help much unless you manage to find the solution on your own. It wastes a lot of time.

Fourth, you cannot even terminate the account if you decide so because you simply cannot log-in to your account. There is no other way to opt-out from vendors’ emails. The vendors will keep sending their offers without even knowing that you are no longer interested in their services or Rakuten advertising.

Fifth, remains unclear if Rakuten advertising is only for the USA publishers or advertisers or is available worldwide. From an affiliate perspective, all the countries are allowed to sign-up worldwide. That would seem everyone can register and become an affiliate if they meet publisher requirements. But the open question remains about pay-outs. It is plausible that affiliate commissions are paid for USA affiliates or affiliates from the countries on the specific list. There is no clear information about eligibility requirements related to specific countries whatsoever. That means you are never sure whether you get the payment or not. We tried to promote some campaigns but never received any commission despite many clicks on the promoted products. It raises some suspicions, and those suspicions are confirmed by feedbacks from their own clients and customers (affiliates).

Sixth, affiliate commission tracking system and pay-outs are lacking information. You will never know whether someone completed the purchase. That means you cannot be certain about your commissions not mentioning stable income. Also, a lot of offers are temporary only and affiliate links may expire, for example, after only 14 or 30 days. That means you must re-apply again to the same offer which you applied earlier. It takes a lot of time and is very uncomfortable. This way you may get lost whether the link is still paying the commission or it is already expired.  

Seventh, banners are poorly made with bad coding. Most ad blockers block them anyway unless you are using direct links. It complicates the whole process and implementation, which takes you a lot of additional time and effort to fix it. Then again, if you fix the code of the banner, you cannot be sure if it pays you a commission because it is an alteration of the banner.

Eight, the affiliate dashboard and system itself are not easy to use. It looks cluttered and based on an old system. The beta version is not ready to use. If you try it, the whole affiliate dashboard just crashes. The reversing procedure is painstaking and requires energy and even more time to set everything right.  

Is Rakuten advertising perspective or challenge?

Based on what we found and experienced, Rakuten advertising is a real challenge. We cannot call it perspective because there are a lot of minuses. We hope that one day they renew and update their entire system and improve their services. We wish best of luck for those who make some profit from Rakuten and for those who try making it right.