Proxy Bidding With JAUCE

A couple of months back I got a recommendation from reader Ryan Laughton to on another Yahoo! Japan Auctions proxy bidding outfit called JAUCE (Japan AUction CEnter).  I was browsing the auctions a few weeks back and decided to give them a shot.

JAUCE charges 800 yen + 8% for an auction win which at first looks like a better deal than kuboTEN's 1000 yen + 10%, especially when you take into account that the 8% is only taken from the winning auction price rather than the 10% from the winning auction price plus domestic shipping.  However, JAUCE charges an additional 300 yen "banking fee" when you pay the seller which kind of wipes out any savings over kuboTEN.

One significant way JAUCE can be cheaper than kuboTEN is multiple auctions.  Once you've won an auction, any auction you win in the next 24 hours is only 400 yen plus 8%, regardless of whether or not it's the same seller.  And you can keep extending this "discount period" as long as you keep winning auctions within 24 hours of the previous one.

One additional expense with JAUCE is the deposit fee - it's a flat rate of 40 yen + 4.15% of the deposit amount (JAUCE's website says 3.9% but the numbers I paid imply 4.15%).  kuboTEN's fee is simply 3.9%.

I had identified two auctions from the same seller that I wanted to buy (the 2015 BBM Eagles set and "uniforms" subset from the 2015 Eagles team issued set) and figured I'd try out JAUCE on them.  Registering for the site was relatively simple but I was a bit put off by the fact that I couldn't just enter the URL of the auction that I had already found anywhere - I actually had to use their search feature to re-find the auctions so that I could bid on them.  The bidding itself, however, was one of the best things about JAUCE - JAUCE does live bidding.  When you tell JAUCE to bid on something, you're not making a bid request that they'll get around to soon - you're actually putting a bid in on the auction right then and there.  Or if it's a "buy-it-now", you're buying it now.

Anyway, enough with the set up!  Here's what I ended up paying for everything.  The two auctions I won the two auctions were from the same seller and ended about a minute apart.  I won one for 800 yen and the other for 700 yen.  My fees for the first auction were 864 yen (800 yen plus 8% of 800 yen) and the fees for the second auction were  456 yen (400 yen plus 8% of 700 yen).  The domestic shipping for the two items was 300 yen total.  Since both items were from the same seller, I only had to pay the 300 yen "banking fee" once.  I had made an initial deposit of 2000 yen - the fees on that ran me another 123 yen on top of that (40 + 4.15% of 2000).

International shipping was 1200 yen.  I had to pay another deposit fee when I paid the balance of what I owed (everything above the initial 2000 yen) so that was another 148 yen.

So here's the summary of the charges (including the deposit fees):

Expense	Amount
Deposit Fee on 2000 yen	123
First Auction	800
Fees on First Auction	864
Second Auction	700
Fees on Second Auction	456
Domestic Shipping	300
Banking Fee	300
International Shipping	1200
Deposit fee on 2620 yen	148
Total	4891

I did not do anywhere near as detailed a comparison as I did last summer comparing kuboTEN and Shopping Mall Japan.  All I doing this time is comparing the fees I paid with JAUCE to what I would have paid with kuboTEN (making the assumption that the EMS shipping fee would be the same):

Expense	Amount
Deposit Fee on 2000 yen	78
First Auction	800
Second Auction	700
Domestic shipping	300
Fees	1280
International Shipping	1200
Deposit fee on 2280 yen	89
Total	4447

So obviously in this particular case, JAUCE was a little more expensive than kuboTEN was.  But what would have happened if the two items were from different sellers?  Here's a table with the comparison:

JAUCE		kuboTEN
Deposit Fee	123		78
First Auction	800		800
Second Auction	700		700
First Auction Fee	864		1110
Second Auction Fee	456		1100
Domestic Shipping	600		600
Bank Fees	600
EMS Shipping	1200		1200
Fee on 3220	173	Fee on 3510	137
Total	5516		5725

So in this case, JAUCE would be the better deal.

There's a price point for determining which proxy company has lesser fees for a single item.  Unfortunately it's a bit difficult to determine because there are actually two variables - price of the item and price of domestic shipping.  If domestic shipping were free, any item that costs more than 5000 yen generates less fees through JAUCE than kuboTEN.  The more domestic shipping costs, the lower that price point gets - for 300 yen in domestic shipping, the point is 3500 yen where it become a better deal through JAUCE than kuboTEN.  At 500 yen for domestic shipping, the price point is 1800 yen.  Once domestic shipping reaches 1000 yen, JAUCE is always cheaper than kuboTEN.  (Just to show my work, if x is the item price and y is the domestic shipping, you need to solve the equation 1000 + y + 0.1*(x + y) > 1100 + y + 0.08*x.)

I want to add a couple comments about JAUCE's service - I was mostly happy with them but I felt that they were a little slow.  It took about 10 days from when I won the auctions before they told me that they had received the items and a couple days after that before they told me what shipping to the US would be.  Granted some of that delay could have been due to the seller, but I wonder if some of it is due to JAUCE's location - they are in Sakaiminato city in Tottori prefecture which is on the Sea of Japan on the north coast of Japan - kinda-sorta between Hiroshima and Osaka.  It seems a bit out of the way to me although I will admit to being somewhat ignorant of Japanese geography.  The 1200 yen EMS fee was pretty amazingly low but they did a minimum amount of repackaging for international shipping - the two items had been only wrapped in paper and placed in a cardboard envelope - no bubble wrap or plastic cases.  In JAUCE's defense they warn that they will do this - I believe their repackaging charge is around 1200 yen.  For the comparisons I did above, I assumed that kuboTEN would charge the same amount for international shipping - in practice I think kuboTEN will generally be a little more than that due to the repackaging that they do.

So to wrap up (and I apologize if this post has been a bit "stream of consciousness"), I believe JAUCE is a worthy competitor to kuboTEN - you can save some money on auction fees if you select your proxy appropriately.