Kenny aka Zippy Zappy tweeted to me last week to let me know that the Mint chain of card stores in Japan was now offering overseas shipping.
Apparently the way it works is that you identify items that you want on their on-line store and send them an email with the urls of the items along with your Paypal address. They'll confirm that the items are in stock and send an invoice to your Paypal address. You have to pay via Paypal. Mint will ship cards either through EMS or through International ePacket. They list the shipping prices as $20 EMS for up to six cards and $10 International ePacket for up to three cards (which looks like the same rate). I don't know what they would charge for a box or if that's even something they're willing to do.
In addition they mention if the items you're ordering have to be gathered from three or more physical Mint stores, they will charge you an additional $5.
I'm not entirely convinced that this is a better deal than using a Proxy Bidding company but it is interesting to see a Japanese card chain acknowledge that there's an international market for Japanese cards.
And thanks Kenny for pointing this out to me!
4 comments:
I'm not entirely sure how much more beneficial this is either. I'll probably give it a try sometime and use my Japanese (if necessary) just in case any troubles come up. Either way, I'd kinda prefer to go with my old method of just trading entire boxes with my collecting buddies in Japan but I figured this might be an attractive method for some souls out there looking for boxes and perhaps singles available in Mint Mall's catalogue.
Now if they would just come off the 25,000円 price tag on that autographed Hensley Meulens card I want....
25000 = $250, right? A bit much.
Yep. On a good day the exchange rate brings that down around $215, but that's still some $100 more than the card has ever sold for on Yahoo Auctions. I was thinking of buying a couple more boxes from that set, but the prices seem to have gone back up on them from about $35 to $60. I'm not fishing for a hit for $60 a box.
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