Rakuten Advertising feed for Shopify

Rakuten's documented flow runs in one direction: the advertiser uploads product information, Rakuten processes it, creates a corresponding publisher tracking URL for each product and makes the result available to publishers over SFTP. Whether Rakuten can also poll a hosted URL on a schedule is documented only in the login-gated advertiser help centre, so treat the feed URL Feedflock produces as a file you hand to Rakuten by whatever route your account provides, not an endpoint you paste and forget.

Worth knowing: the file a publisher downloads is a different vocabulary entirely (Product Name, SKU Number, Primary Category, Retail Price, Sale Price, Currency), with availability hyphenated as in-stock and out-of-stock. Those are Rakuten's storage shapes, not what you send. A developer who has only seen a publisher file will try to “fix” your feed into the wrong spelling.

Every attribute name in Rakuten's spec is Google's, but three closed enums are not: condition takes New, Refurbished or Used, gender takes Male, Female or Unisex, and age_group takes only Adult or Kids: two values where Google has five. Copying a working Google feed here ships three silently wrong columns, which is why the template checks the exact spellings.

Other rules are stricter than Google's too. item_group_id is required on every channel, used to collapse variants of one product into a single object. The gtin list is UPC-12, EAN-13 and JAN 8-or-13. A 14-digit barcode is outside it, and the template flags one instead of shipping it. Titles stop at 70 characters; the 255 you may have seen is the publisher file's storage size, not your limit.

One sentence in Rakuten's spec carries more money than the rest combined: the id must correspond with the item identifier used in the tagging on site. The feed id is the join between a product listing and a tracked sale. If your conversion tag reports the Shopify variant id while the feed sends the SKU, every sale goes unattributed. The template defaults id to the Shopify SKU for exactly this reason, with the variant id as fallback when no SKU is set.

Two more id rules matter. The value must not change after the item is created: a stable SKU, never a rotating key. And duplicates are collapsed into one using the first occurrence in the file, so a shop that reuses one SKU across variants silently loses rows.

Rakuten's price pair runs opposite to intuition: price is the original item price and sale_price the current one, required whenever the sale price differs from the regular price. Both carry a value and a currency: 19.99 USD. The template is compare-at aware: the regular price goes to price, and sale_price is emitted only when the variant is actually on sale. Rakuten never mentions VAT anywhere in its documentation.

Images need to be at least 600 × 600 px, and up to ten additional images go into additional_image_link, comma-separated in a tab-delimited file. Shipping and tax have Google-shaped attributes, but Rakuten's own advice is to configure both in Google Merchant Center apart from the feed, which is why the template leaves them unmapped. And commissions (the cost that matters in an affiliate network) live in your program terms with each publisher, not in the feed.