Buyee.jp

After seeing prices rise, and availability of some things wane I thought I'd have a look at Yahoo auctions Japan. I know of a few proxy services, but most of them seem awkward to use, until I stumbled on buyee.jp, which is owned by the Rakuten group (of play.com fame). Since I've never used a proxy like that I thought I'd give it a shot.

Buyee gives you availability of a big chunk of Yahoo auctions Japan, but their fees do soon mount up, so they seem to be more useful for things that aren't readily available. I've started by testing the waters on a few items to see how much it will end up costing me. The fees are a flat rate of 200 yen for each item you win, plus 10% of item fee (or 500 yen, whichever is higher). Then for more expense they request sellers to send the items to them with only tracked post, and each package separate (if you win 2 things from the same seller). Finally they ship everything via EMS. I'm still waiting for some of my things to arrive so I can bundle it to save on the postage fee (1000 yen fee for doing that), but if I were to take a single MVS cart from them, the fees would look like this:

Note, £1 is approx 167 yen on Paypal at time of writing.

MVS Cart: 1000 yen (about £6)
Flat fee: 200 yen
Auction fee: 500 yen
Domestic Post: 750 yen
EMS: 2100 yen
Total: 4550 yen (about £27)

So as you can see, the costs can quickly mount, especially on a item that worth practically nothing anyway.

Once I get all my items at their warehouse ready for postage I'll let you know the full breakdown.