Japanese Shipping Services?

Hello!
I'm not looking for a bidding or proxy service, I'm looking to buy and have the items shipped to me. whether that is buy from store and send to warehouse, or warehouse picks them up and sends them to me, or warehouse orders and ships to me.
I want several items from a store that does not ship internationally and I'm not sure how to go about getting it here, or how much it will cost. Any advice? i'm a little apprehensive about ordering without knowing a shipping cost. i believe the items may weigh as much as 4 lbs. Hard to say. 2 plates, 2 bowls, 3 glasses, 2 containers and so on...
Unfortunately i do not know anyone in japan.

 

I was going to say there are lots of thread already on proxy services, but I guess what your looking for is really more of a personal shopper? I'm not sure if anyone really provides that kind of service (At least that I know of).

 

Feel free to send me a PM.

 

(Not hotlinking, all experiences are mine, I don't get any kickbacks

If you can find and order what you want yourself, and need a freight forwarder because seller will not ship outside of Japan, then I've used tenso dot com in the past. They would want a scan of ID to validate an account, and first time they would want to ship to the address on the ID, after that, they are fine. Once you open an account, they will provide you with an address in Tokyo. They will do package consolidation, and will hold your packages for a month (so you can get a bunch of packages, then hit the consolidation button and have them merge it). I find them expensive, especially the package consolidation and repacking part. They will report the actual invoice price on the bill of shipping, so if you live in a country where you have to pay taxes on the value of a foreign package, you will.

They now have another service, called Buyee, that is supposed to be personal shopper, but I never used it.
Both Buyee and Tenso occasionally have sales/discounts on orders from Rakuten and (much less often) from Amazon Japan, which is probably the best time to buy.

In the past, the main reason I'd use Tenso, is to buy used books from Amazon Japan/Bookoff, where they would accept credit card, but would not ship outside of Japan.

If you want a little bit more personal service, Whiterabbitexpress can do it, and sometimes it could be cheaper then Tenso (they also will tell you how much it will cost to consolidate the package up front)

(Example: I once assembled 2 years worth of back issues of Kendo Nippon magazine (that had a continuing series I was/am reading/translating). In my case, I was ordering 22 issues from 15 different Amazon sellers, and Whiterabbit was cheaper then Tenso for consolidating everything in one big 20 pound box, and shipping it (I generally pay for the cheapest shipping by boat, since for items like this, I am not time constrained) )

You will need to e-mail Whiterabbitexpress (form on their web site), give them the URL and the price, and explain what you want and your address. They will give you one invoice to pay for buying it for you (price plus whatever markup they have), and, once you paid, will place an order. Once they receive the package from seller, they will invoice you a second time, for shipping it to you. Used them about 3 times, last time about 4 years ago, each time they would get back to me very fast (within an hour if during Japan business hours).

They can be helpful if the seller doesn't accept international credit cards, but, if you are bidding on auction, etc, which is time sensitive, they will probably not be sitting there waiting to snipe an auction for you 10 seconds before it's over.

That's personal experiences. If you do a google search for "package forwarding Japan" on google and Yahoo, you will find many different companies, that all do the same, and only differ in their handling fee.

 

I run a small Shipping service from Japan to the USA and Canada. I offer excellent rates and can get something much cheaper to you, you can PM me. Also, check out my website on my Shipping Service:
http://moddestlyyours.jimdo.com/