I got a message last week from Noppin, the proxy bidding company that I use to buy most of my new baseball card sets off of Yahoo! Japan Auctions. They are going to temporarily shut down for three months starting on November 2. What this means is that they will no longer take new orders although they will continue to store items previously ordered until the end of the year. If you don't request that your items get shipped by December 31st they will close your account and dispose of your items.
They've been forced to do this by the ongoing issues in shipping from Japan to the US (and other places) caused by the pandemic. Last April Japan Post announced that it would no longer ship via EMS to the US due to a lack of flights so Noppin has allowed customers to store items indefinitely (as well as ship using other carriers such as UPS and DHL). However since the situation has really not improved (and is unlikely to improve until January 20th) they are starting to run out of storage space ("our warehouse is not unlimited").
They will return to normal operation after January 31, 2021 (or as close to normal that the pandemic will allow). You can read the message here.
The other proxy services that I've used do not appear to be following suit. JAUCE has a message up from early August saying that they'll ship via either DHL or surface. KuboTEN doesn't have any news up about any shipping issues or anything Coronavirus related at all. I haven't used kuboTEN for a number of years so I don't know if they're actually still operating.
I'm not sure yet how this is going to affect me. Noppin is currently storing three sets for me and I'm waiting until the next Calbee set comes out (in another week or so) before getting everything shipped. I'm anticipating a couple more sets coming out before the end of the year that I'll want to get (BBM Fusion and Time Travel, Calbee Samurai Japan and Epoch JWBL) but none of those have been announced yet (and the JWBL set is probably unlikely). I'll probably use JAUCE to get any of those sets during the three months Noppin will not be available - hopefully JAUCE doesn't do anything similar.
4 comments:
Ah....so from November I'll be able to bid on stuff on Yahoo Auctions without facing competition from people bidding through proxies?
Oooh, there could be some real bargains to be had. I've been curious for a while how much prices there were being determined by Japanese collectors and how many overseas, this could be a good way of testing that.
BTW let me know if this means you need some help with stuff (like procuring the Calbee Series 3 set), I can pick up and store some stuff like that until the mail starts working again.
Oh, just to follow up, I just checked Japan Post and last Friday they made a change. They are now accepting "Small Packet" mail to the US, so I think for small stuff under 2kg it might be possible to mail to the US now (though its a bit confusingly worded):
https://www.post.japanpost.jp/int/information/overview_usa_en.html
Thanks for the offer, Sean. I think I'll be able to get Calbee Series Three via Noppin as it should be out before they suspend service. I'll have to see what happens with anything that gets released while they're not operating - you, Ryan and JAUCE are probably my best bets.
It would be interesting to know how much bidding is being done by proxy companies on baseball cards. I know that I've never bid on anything that another Noppin customer was bidding on but I have no idea if someone using a different proxy company was going after the same auction I was.
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