Rakuten forced sellers to absorb shipping over ¥3,980 — and drew an emergency injunction

On 29 January 2020 Hiroshi Mikitani put the plan to merchants at Rakuten's New Year conference in Tokyo: from 18 March every Rakuten Ichiba order above ¥3,980 — ¥9,800 for Okinawa and the remote islands — would be shown to shoppers as 送料無料, free shipping, with the seller absorbing the whole delivery cost. Participation was framed as settled. Since 1 August 2019 the company had been signing new store contracts only with sellers who agreed to join, and when merchants objected to the wording Mikitani renamed the scheme 送料込みライン while insisting it would still launch on schedule.

Sellers organised. Rakuten Union, a voluntary association of Ichiba tenants, said rewriting the terms that way was an abuse of Rakuten's superior bargaining position under the Antimonopoly Act. The commission investigated, and on 28 February 2020 filed with the Tokyo District Court for an emergency cease-and-desist order under Article 70-4(1), asking the court to bar the scheme until it had ruled. Japanese trade press reported it as the first such emergency filing in 16 years — made 19 days before launch day.

Rakuten conceded on 6 March, opening a procedure for stores to apply for exclusion, and the JFTC withdrew the filing on 10 March while saying it would keep testing whether the choice was voluntary. On 6 December 2021 it published what the review had found: store-facing sales representatives had told merchants that non-participants would fall in Ichiba search results, or vanish from a shopper's default view once free shipping had been filtered for; that from 10 May 2021 any change of store plan required joining the scheme; and that holdouts might simply not be renewed at contract expiry.

The cost landed on the sellers. Stores could in principle add the lost shipping to their prices, but the commission recorded stores whose profits fell because they could not pass it on, and stores that did and then lost customers to cheaper non-participants. Others saw basket values drop once the free-shipping threshold came down. Rakuten offered remedial measures, the JFTC judged them sufficient to resolve the suspicion, and the case closed without a fine — with implementation left for the regulator to verify.

No fine, but the uniform rollout died 12 days before launch and Rakuten accepted JFTC-verified limits on its search ranking, plan changes and renewals.

The launch date came first: from 1 August 2019 new store contracts were signed only with sellers who agreed to join, so consent was a precondition of trading rather than a choice.

The policy moved a real cost — delivery — onto merchants while showing shoppers only the word 'free', so any seller unable to raise prices absorbed it.

Enforcement was left to store-facing sales reps, who hinted at search demotion, plan-change conditions and non-renewal to lift participation rates.

Renaming 送料無料ライン as 送料込みライン addressed the wording Mikitani admitted was misleading, but left the pressure on non-participants untouched.

Rakuten treated the March 2020 withdrawal of the injunction as the end of the matter; the JFTC treated it as the start of a 21-month review.

Optional participation means nothing if opting out is punished. Consent collected by reps wielding search-ranking and renewal threats is a competition problem, not a rollout detail.

The JFTC closed the review on 6 December 2021 only after Rakuten pledged not to treat non-participating stores unfavourably, not to tie plan changes or renewals to joining, and to accept opt-out applications; the commission said it would confirm implementation, and Rakuten told stores to report any breach to its Ichiba complaint desk. The plan-change condition had already been dropped on 1 July 2021. No fine was imposed and the ¥3,980 display survives as an opt-in badge, but the February 2020 filing is still cited in Japan as the moment platform terms became enforceable at speed.