Even worse, rakuten.com is now the former ebates site? And the former buy.com is rakuten.com/shop?

Their branding strategy is garbage.

Rakuten bought ebates many years back (looks like 2014) but kept the ebates branding until very recently.

But, yes, it's confusing.

They're a pretty strong brand in their home country of Japan and I guess they'd rather be known as Rakuten worldwide rather than different names in different countries.

Yep, Kobo is now "Rakuten Kobo". I haven't yet seen this on OverDrive, which they also own. To my ear, the names don't go together quite as well, since one sounds very American/English, and the other sounds very non-English (and Americans seem to have difficulty figuring out how to pronounce it).

When Rakuten released a commercial devoted to explaining how to say their name, I wondered if their marketing dept realized what a terrible idea the name change was.

Why would you give up buy.com for "rakuten"?! What is rakuten anyway? Is this an established online retailer? First time I'm hearing of this company.

Rakuten is very big in Japan, pretty established. Like Amazon/eBay, but a bit different. They've also got global but quite cautious ambitions.

Interesting trivia from a friend working there, and quite unusual for a Japanese company: most (Project Management, Development, Management) internal communication above a certain job-grade level is conducted in English, including in Japan.

This is true and really neat. I was in Japan a couple years ago and met a product manager that worked at Rakuten and he told me the same thing.

We saw a Rakuten building from the freeway during a visit to SV, and we wondered what they did. Found out on Wikipedia. Que the Bader-Meinhof effect, we started noticing the ads on TV.

However, I have never heard of buy.com, but I have heard of rakuten!

Ditto: play.com -> rakuten

I did use play.com lots, but never Rakuten so far.

That may also be that I don't buy CDs, DVDs anymore.