Rakuten, the former sponsor of Barça and better known in Spain as an audiovisual channel, has just launched a strategy to eat up territory from e-commerce giants such as Amazon.
Starting this Monday, the Japanese e-commerce platform starts an incentive program for consumers who, on a small scale, have already tested some brands in Spain, known in the jargon of the sector as "cashback". Its literal translation is cash back.
That is exactly what the German market place proposes. Through its e-commerce platform, products can be purchased from more than 700 popular brands, some as well-known as El Corte Inglés, Fnac, MediaMarkt, Booking and even the popular Chinese e-commerce AliExpress.
What Rakuten offers as of this Monday is that users who download their application and through it buy at any of these stores, will receive 30% of their order in euros transferred to their bank or PayPal account.
Until now, Rakuten's promotion was to provide customers with 30% of their purchases in points to exchange them for gift cards for services from the platform itself such as movie or television premieres, books through Kobo (Amazon's Kindle competitor) or even for your Viber Out messaging. This option remains active and for those who opt for it, Rakuten offers an additional incentive, the 20% value increase for points. In other words, for each euro recovered from cashback, they will receive 1.20 convertible points.
"Our Rakuten Points program is inspired by the popular Rakuten Points program in Japan, which has rewarded its members with more than 2.5 trillion points (a value of 23 billion dollars). Therefore, the points will continue being at the core of our loyalty program vision and the key pillar of the Rakuten Ecosystem experience," said Toby Otsuka.
But aware that points programs do not have the same appeal in all countries. Rakuten customers in Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom will also have, from now on, the option to recover 30% of that cash on each of their purchases to use it for what they prefer: savings, investment or purchases of products in any other place.
As explained by the company that has its command center in Spain located in Barcelona, "users should only have the Rakuten extension installed in the browser of their devices, from that moment on each time the user browses an affiliated brand , the extension will notify you of the available cashback”.
Rakuten's strategy comes at a time when, after the outbreak of the pandemic, electronic commerce has skyrocketed, and Spain has established itself as the third European country with the highest turnover thanks to online sales, (68.4 billion euros, according to data from the Qapla' shipment management platform.
In his report on the situation of electronic commerce in Europe for 2021 and trends for 2022, he assured that 76% of Spanish Internet users already make purchases online on a regular basis. The forecast is that the volume of online orders will continue to grow, although at a slower rate than the previous two years.
But beyond the total volume that Spaniards buy, what is drawing attention to their behavior is the increase in the conversion of their visits to online stores, which has increased by 10.65% since before the pandemic.
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