Rakuten Ichiba is Japan's largest e-commerce marketplace and operates on a fundamentally different model from Amazon or eBay. Rather than a product-first catalogue, Rakuten runs a shop-in-shop system — each seller maintains their own branded storefront within the Rakuten ecosystem. This structural difference directly shapes the image requirements: main images are tightly controlled for consistency, while secondary image slots offer significant freedom for brand expression. This guide covers every technical requirement Rakuten enforces in 2026, including the nuances between Rakuten Ichiba (Japan) and Rakuten's global platform extensions.
Rakuten Ichiba vs Rakuten Global: What's Different
Rakuten Ichiba is the flagship Japanese marketplace with its own image specification set. Rakuten's global platforms — including Rakuten.com (US) and Rakuten France — follow generally similar technical requirements but may differ in specific dimension minimums and listing structures. This guide focuses primarily on Rakuten Ichiba, which carries the strictest and most detailed image rules. Sellers targeting the Japanese market should treat these specifications as the authoritative standard.
Main Image Requirements
Format and Dimensions
- Accepted formats: JPEG, PNG — WEBP is not supported on Rakuten Ichiba
- Minimum size: 640×640px — listings below this threshold may be suppressed or penalised in search ranking
- Recommended size: 1000×1000px or higher — enables Rakuten's zoom functionality, which is actively used by Japanese buyers before purchase
- Maximum file size: 10MB per image
- Aspect ratio: square (1:1) is the standard for main product images on Rakuten Ichiba
Background
- Main image background must be plain white — Rakuten Ichiba mandates white backgrounds for the primary product image across most categories
- Lifestyle backgrounds, gradients, and textured backgrounds are not permitted in the main image slot
- Off-white or light cream backgrounds are technically borderline — pure white (#FFFFFF) is the safe and recommended standard
Product Fill
- Product must occupy at least 75% of the frame
- Rakuten's 75% fill requirement is slightly lower than Amazon's 85% minimum, but the practical effect is the same: a product that appears small in the thumbnail loses click-through against competitors with tighter framing
- The entire product must be visible with no cropping of edges, handles, or extremities
Prohibited on Main Image
- Price text — no sale prices, regular prices, or discount callouts on the main image
- Promotional text — no banners, campaign text, limited-time offer labels, or point multiplier announcements
- Shop logos — your store logo or brand watermark must not appear on the main product image
- QR codes, external URLs, or social media handles embedded in the image
- Decorative borders or graphic frames
Secondary Images: Up to 20 Per Listing
Rakuten Ichiba allows up to 20 product images per listing — significantly more than most Western marketplaces. This reflects Rakuten's shop-in-shop model: sellers are expected to use secondary image slots to communicate brand identity, product story, and detailed specifications in a way that feels more like a brand page than a product card.
- Secondary images follow the same format (JPEG/PNG) and file size (10MB) limits as the main image
- Background restrictions do not apply to secondary images — lifestyle photography, contextual shots, and detailed feature callouts are all permitted
- Infographic-style images showing dimensions, material details, and usage instructions are standard practice on Rakuten Ichiba and perform well with Japanese buyers
- Brand identity images — including logo placement, brand story imagery, and collection context shots — are actively encouraged in secondary slots
- Detail and close-up shots (texture, stitching, hardware) are highly valued in the Japanese market where product quality assessment before purchase is thorough
Rakuten's Shop-in-Shop Model and Brand Identity Images
Unlike Amazon, where product listings are standardized to reduce brand differentiation, Rakuten Ichiba explicitly supports seller brand expression. Japanese buyers on Rakuten are accustomed to browsing branded shop pages — not just generic product cards. This makes secondary image slots strategically important:
- Use secondary images to establish brand positioning — a consistent visual identity across your Rakuten shop builds trust with Japanese buyers who tend to research extensively before purchasing
- Collection imagery showing your product range in a curated lifestyle context works well in later secondary positions
- Certification badges, quality marks, and origin information (for international sellers entering Japan) perform well as dedicated image slides
- Japanese buyers respond well to detailed size charts, care instruction images, and compatibility guides embedded as secondary images
Mobile Optimisation: Over 60% of Rakuten Purchases Are on Mobile
More than 60% of Rakuten Ichiba purchases are completed on mobile devices. This has direct implications for image strategy that go beyond simply meeting the technical minimums:
- Portrait-orientation secondary images perform better on mobile. While Rakuten's main image is square, secondary images displayed in portrait format (roughly 3:4 or 2:3) fill more of the mobile screen and hold attention longer in the swipe-through image gallery
- Text and callout labels in secondary images should be sized for mobile legibility — small text that reads clearly on desktop becomes unreadable at mobile thumbnail sizes
- High-contrast product photography is critical on mobile: small screens in varied lighting conditions (commuting, outdoors) benefit from images with strong contrast and clear subject separation from the background
- The main 1000×1000px square image renders well across Rakuten's mobile interface — do not reduce below this recommended size even if 640px meets the technical minimum
R-Cabinet: Rakuten's Image Hosting System
Rakuten Ichiba uses a proprietary image hosting system called R-Cabinet for storing and serving product images. R-Cabinet has specific file naming requirements that differ from simply uploading images through a standard file manager:
- File names must use alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores only — Japanese characters, spaces, and special characters in file names will cause upload failures
- File names are case-sensitive in R-Cabinet — maintain consistent naming conventions across your catalog to avoid broken image links
- Image URLs generated by R-Cabinet follow a specific path structure tied to your Rakuten shop ID — do not attempt to hot-link images from external servers on Rakuten Ichiba product pages
- R-Cabinet enforces the 10MB file size limit at upload — oversized files are rejected at the upload stage, not silently compressed
- Recommended naming convention: use a structured format such as
productcode-variant-angle-01.jpg(e.g.,tshirt-red-front-01.jpg) to keep large catalogs manageable inside R-Cabinet's folder structure
Rakuten Ichiba vs Other Marketplaces: Key Differences
If you've already prepared images for Amazon, eBay, or Shopify, several Rakuten-specific factors require attention:
- Lower fill requirement (75% vs Amazon's 85%) — but tighter framing still outperforms loose compositions in click-through rate
- Higher secondary image allowance (20 vs Amazon's 9) — Rakuten expects sellers to use this space; sparse listings with only 2–3 images appear low-effort compared to competitors who use all available slots
- Brand identity is explicitly supported — Amazon suppresses logo placement in secondary images; Rakuten encourages it as part of shop-in-shop brand building
- WEBP is not supported — if your existing workflow exports to WEBP, you will need to add a JPEG/PNG conversion step for Rakuten
- R-Cabinet file naming rules are stricter than simply uploading to Shopify or WooCommerce media libraries
Preparing Images for Rakuten Ichiba at Scale
A practical workflow for multi-SKU Rakuten Ichiba catalogs:
- Shoot and process main images to 1000×1000px minimum on pure white. The 640px minimum is a floor, not a target — zoom functionality on Rakuten requires higher resolution to be useful, and Japanese buyers actively use zoom before purchase
- Plan for 8–12 secondary images per SKU. Rakuten's 20-image allowance rewards thorough visual storytelling. A practical set includes: main product shot, detail close-ups, size/dimension graphic, usage/lifestyle shot, material callout, packaging image, and brand identity image
- Prepare at least one portrait-orientation secondary image per SKU. A 3:4 or 2:3 vertical image used in secondary slots fills more of the mobile gallery view and outperforms landscape crops in mobile engagement
- Standardise file naming before uploading to R-Cabinet. Rename files in batch to your chosen convention (e.g.,
sku-color-angle-sequence.jpg) before upload to avoid mismatches and broken references in your product data feed - Export in JPEG at 90% quality or higher. PNG is acceptable but produces larger files — JPEG at high quality is the standard for Rakuten Ichiba and stays well within the 10MB limit even at 1500×1500px
Background Removal for Rakuten Ichiba
Clean, accurate background removal is the foundation of Rakuten main image compliance. Japanese buyers are highly attuned to image quality — a main image with imprecise edges, colour spill, or grey haloing around the product is visible at full size in Rakuten's zoom view in a way it may not be on smaller thumbnail-only platforms.
Specific quality issues that show up under Rakuten's zoom functionality:
- Fringing artefacts — white or off-white haloing around product edges against the white background, caused by imprecise masking, is clearly visible under zoom
- Colour spill — background colour bleeding onto product edges, particularly on reflective surfaces (jewellery, electronics) and transparent materials (glass, acrylic)
- Loss of fine detail — hair, fabric texture, and fine metalwork require hand-edited masks that AI removal tools alone cannot reliably produce at the quality level Japanese buyers expect
For full Rakuten Ichiba catalog preparation — including white background processing, 1000×1000px sizing, and secondary image set creation — our e-commerce photo editing service handles the full process. Submit 5 images for a free trial to verify quality before committing your catalogue.
