Guides to buying and shipping from Japan
The things worth understanding before you order: what import charges to expect, what cannot be shipped, why a light parcel can cost more than it weighs, and how to read a Japanese listing.
What is Japan proxy shopping?
Most Japanese shops sell only to people with a Japanese address, a Japanese phone number and a Japanese payment method. A proxy shopping service is the way around that: someone in Japan buys the item on your behalf, receives it, and ships it to you.
Proxy buying or parcel forwarding — which do you need?
Both end with your parcel arriving from Japan, but they start differently, and picking the wrong one wastes either money or time. The deciding question is simply whether you can complete the purchase yourself.
How bidding on Yahoo! Auctions works
Auctions do not have a price — they have a maximum you are willing to pay and a result you find out later. Here is exactly what we bid, what you need in your balance to place it, and what you end up paying.
What cannot be shipped from Japan
Some goods cannot leave Japan by air freight at all, and some cannot enter your country. The list below is what we are unable to ship under any service — it comes from our live shipping policy, so it is current rather than a copy of someone else's page.
Customs, duty and tax when importing from Japan
Import charges are set by the country your parcel is going to, not by us or by the shop, and they are paid by the person receiving the parcel. This is the part of international shopping that surprises people most often, so it is worth understanding before you order rather than at the door.
Volumetric weight: why a light parcel can cost more than it weighs
Couriers do not bill purely on what a parcel weighs. They bill on chargeable weight — the greater of the actual weight and a figure calculated from the box's size. For anything bulky and light, the size figure wins, and that is where unexpected shipping costs come from.
How combining parcels cuts your shipping cost
International shipping is charged per parcel, not per item. That one fact is where most of the money is saved or wasted when shopping from Japan, and it is the reason we hold your items free for the first 30 days.
FedEx or Japan Post — which should you ship from Japan with?
These are the two families of service we ship with, and they behave very differently. The right answer depends on how heavy your parcel is, how big it is, and how quickly you need it — not on which brand you recognise.
Japanese clothing and shoe sizes explained
Japanese sizing runs smaller than European and American equivalents, and the letter on the label is not comparable across markets. Getting this wrong is the most common reason customers want to return something they bought from Japan — and returning clothing after it has been forwarded overseas is rarely practical.
Japanese secondhand condition grades explained
Japan's secondhand market is unusually good — items are typically described honestly and kept in better condition than the same goods elsewhere. But the grading vocabulary is specific, and it is the difference between a bargain and a disappointment.
Japanese shopping terms you will actually run into
You do not need to read Japanese to shop in Japan, but a couple of dozen recurring words decide whether a listing is a good deal. These are the ones that appear constantly on Japanese shopping sites.