Please forgive the cliché, but when hundreds of online shoppers say that your site is sick, it should lay down. The Japanese E-Commerce powerhouse Rakuten, which is just months away from a planned major push against Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) in the U.S., is finding itself in the frustrating position of seeing literally hundreds of its customers posting about fraud problems traced to Rakuten. And yet the $4.7 billion global retailer—operating in 27 countries—can't seem to trace the problem.
An online publication of Consumer Reports magazine, the Consumerist, has taken the lead in this coverage, and Rakuten's shopper victims have created their own site, much to the presumed non-delite of Rakuten. The site's called simply Rakuten Fraud. What's worse than having a security hole on your site on the eve of a major rollout impacting lots of customers? How about being unable to figure out where the hole is? Bernard Luthi, the COO of Rakuten.com, has become the public face of this breach and is arguing that there's little his team can do until they can somehow replicate or trace the source of these breaches.