How to shop at Rakuten! -

Rakuten is one of the biggest online retailers in Japan. If you are familiar with Amazon, it is a bit like that… But Rakuten is actually a large group of services, offering a range of services from banking, phone services, insurance, credit cards, and more! When you join the Rakuten network, you can easily link up all of your services and pay for everything on one convenient site.

Today, I will show you how to use Rakuten to shop for products online. This is very helpful when you are living in Japan for a while.

Table of Contents

Signing up for an account
1. Starting the sign-up process
Searching and ordering products
1. Using the search function
2. Navigating your findings
3. Coupons and Deals
4. Sorting options
5. Checking out
My recommendations to get started!
1. For those new to Japanese
Rakuten official English guide
Conclusion, any questions?

Signing up for an account

Signing up for an account is simple！

Click the banner below to get started then follow my guide for a smooth sign-up!

Starting the sign-up process

After clicking the banner above, click on the button that says “楽天会買登録(無料)” to start the sign-up process.

After clicking the link, you will see three language options in the top right corner. Click “English” if you want to sign up using English.

You can use English by clicking the English button on the top right!

Follow the instructions in English or Japanese on the website. You will get a confirmation link to your email. Click the confirmation link and you are ready to sign in and start shopping!

After you are finished, you will login using the “ログイン” button on the top right of the site.

After signing up, click the “ログイン” button!

Searching and ordering products

Using the search function

Shopping with Rakuten is simple. You can search using key words from the search banner. (See image below)

You can search in both English and Japanese, but you will have much better luck using Japanese keywords.

If you have trouble with Japanese, you can use a dictionary or translation service to help you search!

Here are two great resources:

https://jisho.org/ – An English-to-Japanese dictionary.

https://www.deepl.com/translator– A translator with greater accuracy than Google translate.

Use keywords in the search bar to find your products！

Navigating your findings

The shopping site is extensive, and it can be a bit confusing to understand the layout.

Below you will see my example of a search. I used “toys” as my keyword for this example.

Coupons and Deals

On the top, you will see “クーポン使えるおすすめs商品”

This scrolling banner shows you special deals and coupons related to your search.

Sorting options

On the left, you will see many sorting options.

Let’s see a few of them:

As you can see, Rakuten has so many options to sort with! It can be a bit overwhelming at first. But please refer to my image guide whenever you have trouble.

Checking out

When it comes to checkout, you will probably have to scroll through a lot of images before you find the “add to cart” or “purchase now” buttons. Here is a picture of what they look like.