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.
Use parcel forwarding when you can check out yourself
If a shop accepts your card and will deliver to the free Japanese address in your account, forwarding is the cheaper route: you pay us only to receive, hold, combine and ship. There is no buying commission because we did not do the buying.
This works well at the larger retailers — Yodobashi, Bic Camera, ZOZOTOWN, most Rakuten shops — and it is the better option whenever it is available to you.
Use the shopping service when the shop says no
Individual sellers on Mercari, Rakuma and Yahoo! Auctions cannot ship overseas at all, and sites like Pokémon Center Online and Animate will not take a foreign card. In those cases forwarding is not an option, because you cannot get the order placed in the first place.
Auctions are their own case: someone has to be in Japan, watching the clock, able to bid. That is a proxy purchase by definition.
You can use both at once
Nothing stops you forwarding a Yodobashi order and having us buy a Mercari listing in the same week. Both land in the same warehouse and go into the same parcel, which is usually the cheapest way to shop across several Japanese sites.
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