Christmas Shopping with Rakuten's Play.Com

Christmas shopping is really starting to gather momentum in our house and we're finding that our list is, thankfully, getting smaller by the day. As Bud is now three and a half he really understands Christmas this year and is already starting to get excited about it so I'm keen to complete the shopping as soon as I can which will leave our December weekends free to enjoy the build up and get out to for Christmas activities and outings with the children.As I'm at home during the day with the children I turn to online shopping rather a lot and have my trusted retailers that I tend to turn to straight away. I used to order a lot from Rakuten's Play.com but it is a good few years since my last order, so many that my old login details wouldn't work and I had to create a new account. They offered me some of their SuperPoints to go shopping on their site and I was happy to put them to good use.

After logging in I was surprised to see that Rakuten's Play.com have stopped selling their own range of products. Every item now sold on their website is fulfilled through merchants in their marketplace facility We always make a list of what to buy for various relatives and I was pleasantly surprised by the range Rakuten's Play.com offered to match up with my list. First point of call was clothing. I have a couple of brothers-in-law who enjoy t-shirts associated with particular TV shows and the range offered by Rakuten's Play.com is extensive. You can find t-shirts for all of the main cult shows of the moment - Doctor Who, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and The Big Bang Theory to name but a few - most of them aren't official but there are some seriously witty and entertaining designs and I was happy to snap up a couple. I also added two truly epic bags to my order which I can't show you as their future recipients do read this blog.

From there onwards I moved onto the toy section where products at opposite ends of the spectrum - Nerf and wooden baby toys - were soon popped into my basket. I then moved onto gifts which has a, frankly, epic range of fun gifts, ranging from stocking fillers up to more expensive presents. My final item was a particular book that I know Red Rose Daddy has on his list.

Whenever you select an item it is immediately clear which merchants sell it and the prices offered by each one. Alongside this information the feedback score for the merchant is presented to help with deciding which seller to use. You can add products from a variety of different merchants to your basket but only have to check out once which was great, and saved a lot of time. All of the prices shown include free delivery and, when this is taken into consideration, I think that they are competitive against the sites who would be regarded as their main rivals. The SuperPoints scheme means that, for every pound spent on the site you receive one point, these can then be used against future orders.

I was really impressed with the ease of use of the site and the way that, essentially, Rakuten's Play.com positions itself in its own niche in a crowded market. I think I'll definitely be checking the site out when I'm shopping online in future and I'll be back to look at their 'daily deals' in the run up to Christmas too.

Disclaimer: I  was supplied with Rakuten Play.com SuperPoints to try out, and write about, my shopping experience there. All opinions are honest and my own.