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.
Why you cannot just order it yourself
Japanese retail is built almost entirely for the domestic market. Marketplace sellers on Mercari, Rakuma and Yahoo! Auctions are private individuals posting from home and have no way to ship abroad. Larger retailers often can, in principle, but decline foreign-issued cards outright — Amazon JP is well known for cancelling those orders after they appear to have gone through.
Even where a shop will deliver domestically without complaint, it will frequently refuse an address it recognises as a forwarding warehouse. A proxy purchase sidesteps all of this, because from the shop's point of view the order is an ordinary domestic sale to a Japanese business.
How it works in practice
You send the product link. We quote the item price, our commission and the domestic shipping, and nothing is bought until you agree to that total. We then purchase in our own name, receive the item at our warehouse in Osaka, and photograph it along with its weight and dimensions.
From there it waits. Storage is free for the first 30 days, which exists so you can keep shopping — anything that arrives in that window can go into the same international parcel, and you pay international shipping once instead of once per shop.
What it costs
There are three parts: what the item costs in Japan, our commission for buying it, and international shipping on the finished parcel. Domestic shipping inside Japan is usually small and sometimes free above a shop's threshold.
International shipping is the part that varies most, because it depends on the destination and on the packed weight rather than on what you bought. That is worth checking before you commit to a large order.
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