Today, The Pokemon Company officially started taking reservations for the first permanent Pokemon Cafe, scheduled to open in Tokyo, Japan on March 14, 2018.

Things have not gone smoothly as planned, due to a minor mistake on the credit card payment page. While the credit card payment page requires customers to enter their credit card’s date of expiry in MM/YYYY, many users have entered the year in YY format instead. Credit card payment is only required for customers who wish to pre-order exclusive Pokemon Cafe merchandise not available at the cafe itself.

Despite the YY format, the website allowed payment and reservations to go through, albeit with an error message that says “Payment has gone through successfully, but an unknown error has occurred. Status 400, no token found.” Customers who encountered this error claimed that they did not receive their reservation’s confirmation email, but yet it was somehow recorded in the system as the reservation website does not allow users with the same email to reserve more than once.

At the time of writing, The Pokemon Company has suspended reservations for the Pokemon Cafe. The company hasn’t made any announcements yet on what will happen to users who have not received their confirmation email, or users who had incorrectly entered their credit card’s date of expiry in YY format. Let’s hope this issue resolves soon.

UPDATE 2 (March 6, 2018 5:28pm JST) – Reservations will re-open at 6pm JST today, and there will be a way to easily check whether your reservation has gone through on the official website.

UPDATE (March 5, 2018 11:54pm JST) – The Pokemon Company has posted this official announcement:

We apologize for the inconvenience caused to all of our customers. Reservations will reopen on March 6, 2018 at 2pm JST. Thank you for your patience.

When the reservation system reopens, we will send an e-mail again to all customers who reserved seats at Pokemon Cafe. The email will come from @mail-pokemon-cafe.jp.

As the possibility of the email going into the spam folder is high, please kindly double check the folder.