Rakuten
Rakuten Group is a Japan-headquartered internet conglomerate spanning e-commerce (Rakuten Ichiba), fintech (Rakuten Bank, Rakuten Card, Rakuten Securities), digital content (Rakuten Books, Kobo, Viki), travel (Rakuten Travel), telecom (Rakuten Mobile, Rakuten Symphony), and advertising (Rakuten Advertising). Rakuten exposes a long-standing public developer platform — Rakuten Web Services (webservice.rakuten.co.jp) — that offers REST/JSON APIs for searching Ichiba items and genres, books, CDs, DVDs, games, software, magazines, Kobo eBooks, Rakuten Travel hotels (simple, detail, vacant, keyword), Rakuten Recipe, and Rakuten GORA golf courses. All RWS APIs use a Rakuten application ID for authentication and are read-only. Rakuten separately operates merchant-facing RMS (Rakuten Merchant Server) APIs and Rakuten Pay merchant APIs, which are partner-gated.
Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.
API Evangelist profiles Rakuten the way a machine reads it — 40 machine-readable artifacts across 33 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Rakuten scores 39.0/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 48/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile Rakuten
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Rakuten. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 33
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Rakuten Ichiba Item Search API
Keyword and parameter search across all Rakuten Ichiba marketplace items, returning item titles, prices, images, shop information, and ranking signals.
Rakuten Ichiba Genre Search API
Returns the hierarchical genre tree used to categorize items across Rakuten Ichiba, enabling category navigation and browse-based product discovery.
Rakuten Ichiba Tag Search API
Returns tags associated with a genre, supporting faceted navigation and refinement of Ichiba item browse.
Rakuten Ichiba Ranking API
Returns top-ranked items across Rakuten Ichiba by genre, age, and gender, used for trend and bestseller displays.
Rakuten Item Price Navi API
Price Navi (Product Search) returns aggregated product records with multi-shop price comparisons, ratings, and review metadata for Ichiba.
Rakuten Books Total Search API
Unified search across all Rakuten Books catalogs (books, CDs, DVDs, games, software, magazines), returning normalized product records and Rakuten Books shop information.
Rakuten Books Book Search API
Search Rakuten Books for Japanese-language and translated books by title, author, ISBN, publisher, and other metadata.
Rakuten Books CD Search API
Search Rakuten Books CD catalog by title, artist, label, and release date.
Rakuten Books DVD / Blu-ray Search API
Search Rakuten Books DVD and Blu-ray catalog including movies, TV, anime, and live performances.
Rakuten Books Foreign Book Search API
Search Rakuten Books foreign-language books catalog (mostly English-language).
Rakuten Books Magazine Search API
Search Rakuten Books magazine catalog by title, publisher, and issue date.
Rakuten Books Game Search API
Search Rakuten Books video game catalog across major consoles and platforms.
Rakuten Books Software Search API
Search Rakuten Books PC software catalog.
Rakuten Books Genre Search API
Returns the genre tree for Rakuten Books, used for browse and navigation across the unified Books catalog.
Rakuten Kobo eBook Search API
Search Rakuten Kobo's eBook catalog for digital reading content across Japanese and international titles.
Rakuten Kobo Genre Search API
Returns the Kobo eBook genre hierarchy for browse and filter.
Rakuten Travel Simple Hotel Search API
Lightweight keyword and area search over Rakuten Travel's Japanese hotel inventory, returning hotel name, location, and basic descriptors.
Rakuten Travel Hotel Detail Search API
Returns full hotel detail records including amenities, addresses, images, and access information for one or more Rakuten Travel hotels by hotel number.
Rakuten Travel Vacant Hotel Search API
Searches for hotels with vacancy for given check-in and check-out dates, party composition, and budget filters.
Rakuten Travel Area Class API
Returns Rakuten Travel's hierarchical Japanese area classification (prefecture / region / detail), used to scope hotel searches and build location filters.
Rakuten Travel Keyword Hotel Search API
Full-text keyword search across Rakuten Travel hotel inventory, with filters for area, price, and rating.
Rakuten Travel Hotel Chain List API
Returns the list of hotel chains available on Rakuten Travel, used to scope searches to a specific brand.
Rakuten Travel Hotel Ranking API
Returns top-ranked Rakuten Travel hotels by area and category for trend, bestseller, and recommendation displays.
Rakuten Recipe Category List API
Returns the Rakuten Recipe category hierarchy (large, medium, small) used for browse navigation of user-submitted Japanese recipes.
Rakuten Recipe Category Ranking API
Returns top-ranked recipes within a Rakuten Recipe category, with images, ingredients, and recipe URLs.
Rakuten GORA Golf Course Search API
Search Rakuten GORA Japanese golf courses by name, area, and facility attributes.
Rakuten GORA Golf Course Detail API
Returns full golf course detail records on Rakuten GORA including holes, yardage, fees, access, and amenities.
Rakuten GORA Golf Plan Search API
Search Rakuten GORA tee-time plans by course, date, party size, and budget — used to surface bookable golf rounds.
Rakuten Pay Merchant API
Rakuten Pay is Rakuten's e-money / QR payment service for Japan, integrated by merchants directly or via PSPs. The merchant API handles order creation, payment authorization, ca...
Rakuten RMS (Merchant Server) API
RMS (Rakuten Merchant Server) is the operational API for Rakuten Ichiba sellers, covering item management, order management, shipping, inventory, and customer messaging. Access ...
Rakuten Ichibagt API
The Ichibagt API from Rakuten — 1 operation(s) for ichibagt.
Rakuten Ichibams API
The Ichibams API from Rakuten — 1 operation(s) for ichibams.
Rakuten Ichibaranking API
The Ichibaranking API from Rakuten — 1 operation(s) for ichibaranking.
Scroll within the panel for all 33 ·
Open Collections 1
Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.
Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).
Rakuten Web Services API
OPEN COLLECTIONPricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Rate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Rakuten Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Rakuten Finops
FINOPSSecurity Posture 2
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for Rakuten — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 2
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 1
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Build 1
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 2
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Company 7
The organization behind the API
Scroll within the panel for all 7 ·
Other 4
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/rakuten · machine-readable index on apis.io