Rakuten issue

Hey everyone. Has anyone ever used Rakuten to buy things online? I've bought quite a few things off of the website before and never had any issues. Recently, there was an issue with something I bought that arrived defective and it wouldn't work properly straight out of the box. I had contacted the company I bought it from immediately to let them know, and wanted to return it for an exchange or just to get refunded to send it back.

They straight up denied being allowed to get refunded, which is rather odd considering they sent a defective item. While emailing them, they seemed as if they weren't even a Japanese company from the way they spoke to me and were quite rude in their responses. Having dong business with Japanese companies, I can tell you that this was NOT even remotely close to what I'm used to seeing for responses ad were denying responsibility to refund. In the end, I had to contact Rakuten itself to get refunded and send the item back since the shop wouldn't help me.

Have any of you guys ever had this kind of issue before in the past? This was a first for me, so I welcome any feedback if you had an issue.

I’m Japanese living in Japan, and I buy often from Rakuten Ichiba shops.
While the level of service has varied from one shop to another (“Rakuten” is just the mall), I have not had any experience like the one you’ve described, and I’m sorry to hear that that happened to you.

There was one shop that was quite late to ship an item, so I tried to cancel it, and they bluntly wrote to me “our policy says no cancellations. Thank you” and that was it (maybe the shop you bought your item from had a policy like that too, no return, no claim), but never any problem like being refused return/refund for a defective item.

I hope it won’t happen again!

I've never had any problem trying to get a refund from a Rakuten shop, or an Amazon shop for that matter, but I understand that a lot of merchandise you buy on-line can only be refunded if the box hasn't been opened yet (which is weird to me).

The other thing is that I do realize that a lot of shops registered to those big on-line malls, including Amazon, often have a pretty big language barrier, even though they seem to be shipping within Japan.

At Rakuten, I only shop from certain stores, but I (am forced to) use a variety of shops on Amazon, and there were times I found their Japanese difficult to understand (I am a Japanese native) or found their expressions (probably due to auto-translation) to sound rude. Fortunately all my problems have eventually been solved, sometimes with the help of the mall (ie. Amazon personnel), and I suppose that's what the bigger on-line malls are there for.

I try my best to write reviews for all the merchandise and shops I've used on-line, so that shoppers can do their homework. And I try my best to write good things, while if I need to write bad things I try to add alternatives, like "This experience was bad, but I think you can make it better by doing so and so." When there is no way to report my problems in the form of a review, I contact a consumer affairs center (消費者センター) so that they could keep track of unfortunate experiences.
http://www.kokusen.go.jp/ncac_index_e.html

I should add, however, that I once posted a "middle star" review for an Amazon shop, while writing specific reasons, and the shop asked me to delete it, because it would ruin their reputation. And I admit that I did delete it, since their service was fairly nice overall. In other words, you can't rely on reviews you "see" on-line.

Thanks for your feedback guys! Yeah, this was the first time I really had an issue with a shop that didn't want to take any responsibility and I even showed them multiple pictures and multiple emails explaining the issue. The response I got was basically "we can't do anything, too bad, see you later." I think the company was a Chinese company, because the product that was delivered to me wasn't even the Japanese item I orderd and said "made in China" as opposed to being advertised as made in Japan on their site.

Yeah, I had contacted Rakuten and they are looking into it, because it seems other people had similar issues with this same company too. Thanks for the responses!