How to add your Kobo Partner ID & Merchant ID (Rakuten)

Find and connect your Kobo credentials!

Joey White avatar
Written by Joey White
Updated over a week ago

In this article, we’ll be walking through how to find and connect your Kobo (Rakuten) Partner ID to your Geniuslink account so you can start earning commissions from this great affiliate program.

Don’t have a Kobo affiliate account yet? Sign up here!

Obtaining your Kobo Partner ID

In order to obtain your Kobo Partner ID and add it to the Geniuslink dashboard you’ll need to grab both the “Partner ID” and "Mechant ID" values from a properly formatted Kobo affiliate link. You can do this by taking a raw Kobo link (eg. https://kobo.com) and going to the Deep Linking tool inside the Rakuten Marketing dashboard and creating a deep link. From the results, grab the values after “id=” and "mid=" , excluding any ampersands (&). See the highlighted values in the screenshot below.

Once you have these values ID, go to the “Affiliate” section in the Geniuslink Dashboard. Click on the blue “Add a program” button and select "Kobo Int. (Rakuten)" from the drop down menu. Then, enter the Partner ID and Merchant IDs you just grabbed.

That’s it! Once you have your these IDs pasted into their appropriate fields, click the blue “Connect this program” button. Your Partner ID and Merchant ID values will be added into your Geniuslink account and all of your geni.us links for Kobo.com will start using the tracking info appropriate for your affiliate account.

If you would like to replace your Partner ID, simply follow the same steps for adding a program, or select “Remove” and repeat this process.


How to test that your Rakuten link is Affiliating

To test that your Rakuten link is affiliating, first build a geni.us link that directs to a page for the retailer whose ID you just added. To do this, first, copy the URL of a page for that retailer directly from the page's address bar.

*Because you have added this retailer's ID to your affiliate page, you will never need to grab affiliate links from that program's affiliate dashboard.

Then, create a geni.us link with that URL by pasting that URL into the link creator on your links page.

To ensure the that your links are affiliating, you'll need to example the redirects. This can be done on redirectdetective.com or by installing a redirect tracing extension such as Link Redirect Trace. Installing a redirect tracing service is necessary because our service adds your Rakuten IDs in the redirects between your geni.us link and the final page URL your customer lands on.

Once you have your redirect tracing tool installed, find your geni.us link and click it. Or paste the URL into the field at redirectdetective.com.

On the page you land on, access your redirect trace. Then and look for your Partner ID and Merchant ID in the redirects. If you've set things up correctly, you'll see them in the same place as the highlighted sections in the image below.

If you see your Partner ID in the redirect, then great, you're all set! However, if not, please ensure that you've correctly added your ID to your Affiliate page and there are no typos in your ID.

If you have any questions or issues, please contact our support team at help@geni.us.

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