What Is Rakuten Affiliate Network?
Rakuten Marketing Affiliate is an affiliate program from Rakuten Inc. that provides integrated marketing solutions that cover affiliate, display and search. Rakuten was nominated #1 Affiliate Marketing Network for seven years in a row. The company is trusted by such established brands as ECCO, Walmart, Lacoste.
Some highlights to illustrate the company’s achievements:
- in 2016 100 million orders were closed via Rakuten Marketing
- Brand Quality and Regulatory Compliance Management Service to secure brand image across marketing channels
- It helps brands affiliate marketing program to be in line with federal requirements
- Rakuten serves 1,1 billion customers worldwide
- It can process payments to 202 countries/regions in 25 currencies.
What Brands Can You Promote?
Back in the early days of affiliate marketing companies were tripping over themselves to find affiliates to promote their products.
And that included some particularly big brands.
In my case that was Creative Labs – I joined Linkshare solely to promote their soundcards and speakers via an affiliate site I no longer own.
Linkshare has always had the “juice” to land the clients other affiliate marketing networks chase after.
So, the question here is: Does Rakuten Marketing still represent brand names that are worth promoting?
The answer is an unequivocal “Yes”.
Here are a few quick examples:
Ease Of Use
Having tons of great companies to promote isn’t worth much if affiliates wind up struggling with the interface.
And way too many companies are guilty of crimes against UI.
Rakuten Marketing has been around for a long time though, so their interface obviously gets the job done, right?
Well, it does…but it also hasn’t changed in almost two decades.
Like not at all – the affiliate publisher dashboard looks the exact same as the day I signed up with them.
Basically, it doesn’t look as polished as some of the other affiliate networks…but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
After all, do you want your affiliate dashboard to win awards for design, or just be incredibly easy to navigate?
I prefer function over form when it comes to this stuff.
But I get that other people will think the Rakuten Marketing interface is ugly what with all the drop-down menu shenanigans and dated look and feel.
It is ugly.
But it gets the job done.
There’s a reason why Rakuten hasn’t tried to “fix” this – it ain’t broken.
Finding Affiliate Programs
So, now that you have an account it’s time to track down some affiliate programs to promote.
This is where you’ll find yourself being very grateful for the simplistic interface.
You can click on ‘Programs’ and then ‘Categories’, browsing through the different programs to find one that ticks all the boxes for you:
Creating Affiliate Links
It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned affiliate or a total newbie – you want the process of creating an affiliate link to be as intuitive as humanly possible.
And with Rakuten Marketing it definitely is – all you have to do is navigate to your ‘Advertisers’, and then click on ‘View Links’
Review the options available to you (Text/Email, Product Links, Banners/Images) and then choose the type of link you want for your page
Getting Paid
It would be incredibly useful if all affiliate networks paid their affiliates in the same way, but that’s simply not the case.
Never take payment schedules or timeframes for granted i.e. the other network pays you weekly so you assume that all affiliate programs are the same.
They’re not.
Let’s take a look at how affiliate payments are handled by Rakuten Marketing though.
Payment Timeframe
All affiliate payments issued by this network are net 60, which simply means you’ll get paid whatever commissions you earned 60 days after you earned them.
So, let’s say you ran a Halloween promo in October – your payment would be authorized by the affiliate program manager in November, and you’d then get paid in December.
I have heard rumors/complaints about affiliate payments being delayed by months – in one case it had turned into net 150.
That was resolved with a phone call though.
Some affiliates are quick to blame Rakuten for this, but they can only issue payments that have been approved.
Pros
- Easy and fast account opening: Rakuten allows all sizes of publishers and bloggers to work in their platform. Otherwise, advertisers won’t be charged any fee to have an account as well as promote their products to the audience.
- High conversion rate: with many years of experience, they build up relationships with a lot of big brands of a wide range of fields. Therefore, when the website places the products of these big brands, you will have more opportunities to sell these products as well as get more commission.
- Variety of ideals: Rakuten Affiliate Network equips you with the essential tools to launch affiliate programs. In this way, each partner will be offered an intuitive dashboard so that you can track commissions, payments, links, as well as plug-ins, all on one. Thanks to this platform, you receive reports in real-time data anywhere at any time you ask for. Besides, with the help of Rakuten Advertising and long-term profitable partnerships, your brand will be spread quickly and widely.
- Comprehensive platform: Rakuten also provides free marketing courses to new to affiliate marketing to learn new knowledge and experience about this field. Or you want to sharpen the skills, whatever the reason, Rakuten Affiliate Network gives you some incredible educational tools and other training materials that will definitely aid you in optimizing your affiliate marketing efforts, as well as jump starting your commission earning phase.
- Dedicated support: customer support is friendly and professional, they will help you figure out all your issues. You can contact them in many ways such as live chat, phone call and email. There are international numbers available for affiliates who live abroad.
Cons
- No PayPal option: as you know, PayPal is the best payment option for international transactions, but Rakuten doesn’t provide this method, instead of that you can use check and direct deposit. Although their payment methods are restricted, they still secure the payout for publishers every payment term.
- Merchant’s requirements are difficult: small affiliates will find it hard to promote products from their merchants. So even successful signing up, you still can’t start earning a commission.
