Rakuten Ichiba images, aligned with the RMS guidelines

Rakuten Ichiba image guidelines in one preset

Rakuten Ichiba (楽天市場) is the largest Japan-origin e-commerce platform and it is architecturally distinct from Amazon.co.jp or Shopee Japan. Every Rakuten seller operates a branded shop (楽天ショップ) with its own design language, header, footer, and inline editorial HTML, which means the image rules that gate a product thumbnail also shape the shop landing page. The Rakuten Image Guidelines published on the RMS (Rakuten Merchant Server) Service Square set a 700×700 square baseline at the catalogue image level, a 2 MB per-image hard cap, and accept JPG, GIF, and PNG as the file formats. Category-specific rules sit on top — Women's Fashion (レディースファッション) and related apparel categories enforce white-background (白抜き) more strictly than the base rule, and partner guidance runs 1000×1000 or higher in practice for zoom. The distinctive Rakuten rules, the ones no other marketplace matches, are the background policy, the 20% text-area cap, and the frame prohibition. Background must be either pure white at #FFFFFF (RGB 255/255/255) or a real-scene photo — solid-fill non-white backdrops that merely look clean are flagged as violations because they look like flat colour fills rather than genuine photography.

The 20% text rule is the single most-cited regulation in Japanese-language seller guidance. All textual overlays combined, across the image, must occupy no more than 20% of the total area, and violations accumulate 違反点数 (violation points) that can result in listing suppression or shop penalties. The frame prohibition is equally firm — decorative frames, double-borders, and coloured bands around the image are explicitly flagged. This preset enforces all three at the export stage. White or real-scene mode is the choice you actually make; the solid-fill grey middle ground is blocked. The 20% text-area guide is rendered as a visible overlay so badges, brand copy, and in-image text stay inside the allowed zone before you ship. Decorative frames are stripped automatically. The output is a 700×700 sRGB JPEG under the 2 MB cap, compatible with RMS catalogue upload and with the inline shop-design HTML that Rakuten shops depend on for landing-page storytelling. Keigo-register seller documentation is respected — Japanese shop owners and their consulting partners can drop into the preset without any register mismatch.

Why the RMS rulebook rewards preset discipline

Rakuten's violation-point system accumulates silently — a shop can cross the suppression threshold weeks before anyone in the back office notices, and the recovery flow is slower than a simple reupload. A preset that enforces the 20% text cap, the frame ban, and the white-or-real-scene background rule at export time closes the most common violation vectors in one pass. Shops running a consistent catalogue across Women's Fashion strict-white listings, food and home real-scene listings, and hobby-category mixed imagery get the same discipline everywhere. The Mall badge analogue inside Rakuten is the accumulated shop reputation, and an image catalogue that stays clean protects it through every guideline sweep.