as a collecter, i have several places to choose from like Ebay, amazon.com, or anywhere else, but i was curious about the Yahoo! japan auctions area. i never got a chance to check it out, but when i heard a lot of people going there to get the much harder to find stuff (stuff you cant always find on ebay, such as items for the Epoch cassette vision,the MSX, and the sharp X68000- and thats just to name a few), i wasnt sure about what to do. so i had some questions for the people who regularly shop there. 1. do you have to have a good knowladge of japanese for easy browsing? 2.can you pay in U.S. dollars(paypal), or do you have to convert your currency? 3. is it more affordable than ebay?(such as buying an famicom at original japanese value, compared to the western ebay merchants who make you pay more just 'cause its an import) i recently heard that Yahoo! japan and Ebay were joining to make foreing bidding easier.
1: The more Japanese you know, the better. It's not *totally* necessary. You can look up names of items in Japanese, and then book mark those searches. There are other tools available I will PM you about. 2: The kicker about YJ is that even more so than Ebay, sellers will not ship abroad. Even if you speak elloquent Japanese, they won't. There are many reasons, including that their shipping service will not pickup international shipments, xenophobia, lack of knowledge on how simple it really is. The way around this is a middleman or bidding service. 3: In many cases, even with the fees tacked on by middlemen and the double shipping which is totally unavoidable, it is. Just depends. There are bargains on both sites. It really is an item per item basis. They are but from the looks of it, it will still be cheaper to go through a 3rd party. It's also not clear whether this new entity they've made will act like a proxy bidding service like the other guys. It seems to me it would be extremely difficult to do on a large scale, not to mention somewhat risky for not a lot of money. Just my thoughts.
Ive been trying to find the best service to buy from yahoo japan and to be honest its mostly a big pain. Also the search function on the site isnt great. You have to exclude lots of words otherwise you end up with some totaly irelevant results. I have yet to find a cheap way to buy from yahoo japan.
The cheapest way is to get a lover / other half / partner / good friend and get them to bid for you, that works quite well. Knowing Katakana / Hiragana and knowing how to use microsoft IME is invaulable for search for items quickly.
I never search stuff, usually just browse the sections - because I only really look at PCE, Towns, X68K stuff its not too bad as there aren't that many pages to go through. For a bidding service I use SMJ - fairly expensive but now I've used them quite a bit often they post stuff out automatically, sometimes before I've even paid for it!
I have a private automatic proxy if anyone is interested. Price structure is similar to SMJ. Cheaper in some instances. Has a pretty cool feature where the system will do all your searching for you, and mail you the results each night. Requires a preapproved email address though, so PM me if you're interested.
Year old thread revived. Heckle away... So anyway whats new on this front? Ive been using a 3rd party company (JAA) but am starting to find it quite annoying/expensive, cheaper items (less than 500yen) cost more in bidder fee's and commission than the actual purchase cost. Is there a better/cheaper (but still reliable company) out there or is there anybody on here who would like to earn some money in exchange for a bit of buying and shipping. I would much rather pay the money to a member here than to a faceless company. I've probably spent about 40,000yen in the last month and about 30,000yen in fees and delivery not including 1 import charge i got pinged for. Alternatively is it worth me registering and conatcting sellers and asking if they would be willing to ship internationaly? Has the mentality to international shipping changed/relaxed?
