Rakuten LinkShare Explained for Beginners

What it is

Rakuten Advertising is an affiliate network. Think of an affiliate network as a dating agency that also handles the paperwork. On one side sit advertisers (brands like you who want more sales); on the other sit publishers (websites and creators who can drive traffic). The network introduces the two, tracks who sent which sale, and makes sure everyone gets paid the right amount at the right time.

The "LinkShare" name is a hangover from the platform's earlier life — it was a standalone US network that Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant, bought back in 2005. You'll still see the old branding pop up in the back-end (the tracking platform is sometimes called "LinkSynergy"), and many veteran publishers will refer to it by either name. They're the same thing.

What makes Rakuten distinctive is its age and its retail focus. It's been around since the late 1990s, which means it has long-standing relationships with large coupon, loyalty, and cashback partners. If your brand is in retail, fashion, travel, or consumer goods, those partners can move real volume.

Why it matters

For a programme manager, the platform you choose shapes almost everything that follows: which publishers you can reach, how reliable your tracking is, and how much manual work lands on your desk. Rakuten matters because it's a "full-service" network — it offers account management, an established publisher base, and tooling for recruitment, commissioning, and reporting all in one place.

The practical upside is that you don't start from zero. Instead of cold-emailing every coupon site individually, you join a marketplace where thousands of publishers can already find and apply to your programme. The trade-off is that you pay for that reach: Rakuten charges advertisers a network fee (usually a percentage on top of the commission you pay publishers), so your true cost per sale is higher than the headline commission rate.

How it works

From the moment you decide to run a programme, here's the rough sequence of events from your side of the desk:

1. You set up an advertiser account and agree commercial terms with Rakuten, including your network fee and any account-management package.
2. You install the tracking tag on your order-confirmation page. This small snippet of code fires when a customer completes a purchase and tells Rakuten which publisher (if any) should get credit.
3. You build your programme terms — your commission rate, cookie window (how long after a click a sale still counts), and the rules about which publisher types you'll accept.
4. Publishers apply to join, and you approve or decline them. You can also proactively recruit the ones you want.
5. Approved publishers grab your links and creatives and start promoting you across their sites, emails, and social channels.
6. A shopper clicks a publisher's link, lands on your site, and (hopefully) buys. The tracking tag records the sale against that publisher.
7. You review and validate transactions — confirming sales are genuine and not returned — before they're locked in for payment.
8. Rakuten pays the publishers out of the funds you've deposited, and you get reporting on what drove what.

Common mistakes

• Treating "set and forget" as a strategy. A programme that nobody manages drifts toward whichever publishers are easiest to find — often coupon sites taking credit for sales you'd have made anyway. Block out time each week to review new applicants and performance.
• Ignoring the network fee in your maths. If you budget for a 5% commission but forget the network override, your real cost might be closer to 7–8%. Always model the all-in cost before you set rates.
• Approving every publisher who applies. Quantity isn't quality. A flood of low-effort sub-affiliates can muddy your tracking and your brand. Read each application and check the publisher's actual site.
• Forgetting to validate transactions. Sales that include returns, cancellations, or fraud should be corrected before payment. Skip this and you'll pay commission on revenue you never kept.

Reporting tips

Once data starts flowing, resist the urge to obsess over total sales alone. The number that tells you whether the programme is healthy is the mix behind it. In the Rakuten dashboard, look at performance by publisher type: are sales concentrated in one or two coupon partners, or spread across content, loyalty, and review sites? A heavy coupon skew often signals that you're rewarding the last click rather than driving genuinely new customers.

Keep an eye on new-versus-returning customer splits where the data allows, and track your effective cost of sale (commission plus network fee divided by revenue) rather than the headline rate. Finally, watch the gap between recorded sales and validated sales — a widening gap suggests returns or tracking issues worth investigating.

When to use it — and when not to

Related guides

← Back to Rakuten Advertising (LinkShare) hub

Frequently asked questions