An Earthquake at Rakuten Books

Perhaps the only thing happening at Rakuten today scarier than having the Tower swaying for more than a minute continuously is a limited exposure of what really happened at Rakuten Books over the past week. For those of you who have not heard, please check this short little bland apology posted on the Books site (sorry, only in Japanese, it seems). It appears that Rakuten Books had a few delayed shipments with movements to new logistics system.

Small thing for an EC behemoth like Rakuten, right? Unfortunately, no. The little passage obvious do not tell the whole story on the enormous extent to which the Rakuten Books brand name is damaged by this whole fiasco. With my partial info collecting, it seems that both the delivery and payment of more than 600 items are having issues. Its not a big size given the number of orders Rakuten Books get, but if Rakuten does contact every customer individually (as stated on the statement on the website), then its a heavy workload.

At the same time, while I am still trying to understand the technical side of the fiasco, for the looks of it now, it seems that DU is in as much of a panic situation as their business counterparts in Package Media. The meetings I arranged with DU new grads are cancelled because they are somehow involved with handling the Books situation...it really goes to show how much resource the company is devoting to this affair (I mean, even the clueless new grads from other DU sections?)

Speaking of resources, emergency teams dealing with complaints from customers regarding Books have been created on 9F, first with 15 people, and perhaps increasing in size later on. Negative reviews regarding Rakuten Books are streaming onto the Books site as we speak (and who knows how many more on 2ch and other forums)...we will wait and see if Rakuten Books can emerge from this without too much damage....

Comments

  1. Tatsuya OiwaMarch 10, 2011 at 2:41 AM

    I have something on my mind that we had such a awful trouble. One reason why we can not manage it, is the GAP in understanding between business side and developing side. What is the most important thing: fast development? safe operation? logistic system? I think Rakuten needs the change of structure between them and needs more hybrid person who can manage the whole business flow like business strategy or operating risks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Xiaochen SuMarch 10, 2011 at 7:33 AM

    hmmm...definitely true....btw, how is DU involved with this Books problem anyways? I am still a bit fuzzy on the details...would be very thankful if you can fill us in on the tech-side issues a bit more

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tatsuya OiwaMarch 10, 2011 at 11:04 PM

    The trouble originally happened from DU side, because of the bug in system transition end of last month. Some of order data was lost in this process, so books engineers are still doing recovery it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Xiaochen SuMarch 11, 2011 at 7:49 AM

    oh..thats why there are delays? cuz the data for the orders were not sent to logistics for actual delivery? wow...

    ReplyDelete

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