ZenMarket

I wanted to do a quick post on a new proxy service that I've started using - ZenMarket.jp.  Twitter user Yeh had told me about them a couple months back.  

For those who don't know what a proxy service is, this is a company that will bid on and buy stuff on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for you.  Depending on the service, they may also allow you to bid on other auction sites or buy from on-line stores that do not ship to the United States.  They handle receiving your items from the seller and shipping them to you.  You'll pay a fee to them on top of the cost for the item, the domestic shipping (from the seller to them) and the international shipping (from them to you).  There may also be a fee for packing your stuff up for international shipping that's typically included in their quote for it. 

The upshot is that a proxy service makes a world of Japanese baseball card options available for a fee.

The proxy services that I have used the most - kuboTEN, JAUCE and Noppin - all charge fees that are based in part on the price of the item you're buying.  For example, JAUCE will charge you 400 yen plus 8% of the price of the item.  I got my 2021 BBM 1st Version set through them back in April.  I paid 5000 yen for the set itself plus 800 yen (8% of 5000 yen is 400 yen plus the 400 yen flat fee) along with a 300 yen "bank fee".  So my 5000 yen 1st Version set really ended up running me 6100 yen.

What's setting ZenMarket apart from the other proxy services is that they just charge a 300 yen flat fee for an auction.  This means that the 2021 Epoch NPB set that I got through ZenMarket back in June only cost me 300 yen above the 2500 yen winning auction bid.  ZenMarket's documentation says something about a 3.5% deposit fee for using a credit card or PayPal but I have never been charged this.

Had I used ZenMarket to buy the 1st Version set instead of JAUCE, I would have only paid 5300 yen for the set - the 5000 yen price plus ZenMarket's 300 yen fee.  I would have saved myself 800 yen.

Their international shipping prices seem to be in line with everyone else.  They will quote you a variety of shipping choices including SAL, EMS, Fedex, UPS and DHL - I'm not sure the other outfits have quite the range of options.

One other thing I like about them is they are pretty good about sending you emails to let you know when they've received your items and when they've shipped stuff out.  One of my few frustrations with Noppin was that I had to constantly log in and check if they'd received the stuff I'd bought yet.

From what I've seen, ZenMarket's only downside is that they will only store your items for 45 days before they start charging you.  Noppin and JAUCE will store your items for 60 days.  This may not seem like much of a difference but it's going to make me have to ship the four sets I expect to buy in August and September of this year in two shipments instead of one.

I again want to thank Yeh for letting me know about ZenMarket.

News From Noppin

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.

Noppin

I had gotten a recommendation a few momths back from Dani to try Noppin, the proxy service that she uses to order merchandise from Japan.  I've tried them a couple of times now and I think it is possible to save money using them rather than JAUCE and kuboTEN to buy stuff from Yahoo! Japan Auctions but it's not entirely clear to me how much.

There are a couple things I like about Noppin right off the bat.  Like JAUCE they offer "live bidding" - when I submit a bid request on an auction through them, they go ahead and make the bid.  With kuboTEN you have to wait up to 12 hours or so for your bid to actually go up (or at least that was the case the last time I used kuboTEN which was probably last winter).  I also like the fact that they use a multiplier on the deposit for the bid limit - so if you deposit 2000 yen your bid limit is 6000 yen.  Other services use the actual amount of your deposit as your bid limit.  One drawback is it isn't as easy as it is with kuboTEN and JAUCE to apply you deposit to your payment - I'm pretty much just leaving the 2000 yen I have on deposit with Noppin there for future use.

The only things I haven't liked so far is that they aren't real good at sending out emails when they've received your items - I usually have to log in to see if they've gotten my stuff.  I was also kind of annoyed when they basically shut down in mid-August for a long weekend for Marine Day - including turning off live bidding.  It coincided with the release of BBM's 2nd Version set and I had to use JAUCE instead (I could have waited but I like to get the new stuff as soon as it comes out).

Noppin's auction fees are calculated a bit differently than the other outfits.  They have a set fee (500 yen) for auctions that end at 4000 yen or less.  For auctions that end between 4000 yen and 40000 yen, the fee is 12.5%.  Auctions that end for more than 40000 yen have a fee of 5000 (12.5% of 40000) plus 7.5% on the amount over 40000 yen.  Note that the auction fee is only calculated using the ending value of the auction - domestic shipping (from the seller to Noppin) is not used in the calculation.

In addition to the auction fee, Noppin also charges a 250 yen "bank wire fee" per payment to a seller - so if you won multiple items from a single seller but Noppin only has to send money once to the seller, you only pay this once.

Noppin also charges 3.5% "payment handling" when you make a payment to them.

This is a lot of numbers to throw at you so let me give you an example.  The first item I bought through Noppin was this year's 1st Version set back in April.  The auction ended with a price of 4800 yen.  Domestic shipping from the seller to Noppin's office in Fukuoka was 510 yen.  Noppin's auction fee was 600 yen and the "bank wire fee" was 250 yen.  The "payment handling" fee worked out to about 215 yen.  So the total cost was 6375 yen.

Doing the math on the other proxy companies I've used (or at least still use :-)), JAUCE would have had an auction fee of 1184 yen (800 yen plus 8% of 4800), a "bank wire" fee of 300 yen and a "payment handling" fee of 322 for a total of 7116*.  kuboTEN would have had an auction fee of 1531 yen (1000 yen plus 10% of the auction price plus shipping total of 5310 yen) and a "payment handling" fee of 266 yen for a total of 7107 yen.  So in this case Noppin gave a savings of over 700 yen.  But our stuff is still in Japan - we haven't talked about shipping to the US yet.

*I need to point out that these are the fees that were being charged back in April when I first did these comparisons.  Since then JAUCE has dropped their fees to 400 yen plus 8% so the auction fee would have been 784 and the "payment handling" fee would have been 205 for a total of 6699 which is still 300 yen more than what Noppin's fees were.

Last year I used kuboTEN to pick up the 1st Version set.  EMS shipping for it and the Tigers 80th Anniversary set was about 1300 yen.  So imagine my surprise when Noppin charged me 2800 yen for EMS shipping for this year's set!  That ate up any savings over the other two companies.  In fairness to Noppin, however, their shipping costs appear to be in line with what JAUCE charges as well - I just paid 3140 yen to have JAUCE ship the 2nd Version set to me.  I haven't done an EMS shipping request through kuboTEN since last winter so I don't know if their prices have gone up as well.

To sum up, I think Noppin is a good outfit to use that may save you a bit of money over JAUCE and kuboTEN (both of whom I would still recommend as well) but be ready to pony up for shipping to the US.

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.

Proxy Shopping On Yahoo! Japan Auctions - A Comparison Of kuboTEN and Shopping Mall Japan

Yahoo! Japan Auctions is a fascinating cornucopia of Japanese baseball cards.  It's amazing what all can be found there, sometimes at very reasonable prices.  There's just one problem - if you don't live in Japan, it's pretty much impossible to order anything.  You have to use a proxy service, which will cause the price of anything you want to grow quite a bit.

So what's a proxy service?  A proxy service is an outfit that will bid on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for you.  They will also handle receiving the item from the seller and shipping the item off to you.  Obviously, there is a fee associated with all of this - typically it is driven somehow by the cost of the item.  So you end up paying the fee, the price of the item, the cost of shipping the item from the seller to the proxy and the cost of shipping the item from the proxy to you.

I believe that there are a number of proxy services out there, but I only have any experience with two of them - kuboTEN and ShoppingMallJapan.

I've been using kuboTEN off and on for about four and a half years now.  I had stopped using them about a year and half ago because frankly the service was terrible.  The guy who runs the site, Craig, was overwhelmed with orders and was also dealing with health issues.  Everything I bid on I eventually got but it took months.  Last spring I decided to give them another chance - Craig has hired people to help him out and he also rolled out a new website that's a lot easier to use.  I've been pretty pleased with the service since then.  kuboTEN charges 1000 yen (roughly $10) as their fee plus 10% of the total of the auction win (including shipping to kuboTEN's office in Fukuoka).  So if you won something for 100 yen with 100 yen for shipping, you'd pay kuboTEN a total of 1220 yen - 100 yen for the item, 100 yen for shipping, 1000 yen fee and 20 yen for the 10% of the auction total.  Keep in mind that you still have to pay for shipping from kuboTEN's office to where ever you are.  You can combine items for shipping if you have multiple wins.  If you win several auctions from the same seller within a 24 hour period, you only have to pay 100 yen (plus the 10 %) more per auction (rather than 1000 yen per auction).

Shopping Mall Japan has apparently been around for quite a while now but I just learned about them last spring.  I've done a couple auctions through them and they're OK.  Their website is kind of clunky (you can only log in or log out on the main page) and it's sometimes hard to find things.  I also feel they are very slow to let you know when things happen.  Their fee structure is a little bit better than kuboTEN's depending on what you're ordering.  There's a $3 "wire" fee plus a processing charge that varies depending on how much your auction win was.  It's $6 for an item less than 2000 yen, $8 for an item between 2001 and 6000 and $1 more every 1000 yen after that up to 33,000 yen.  Between 33,000 and 100,000 yen it's a flat fee of $35 and beyond 100,000 it's $0.50 per 1000 yen.  If you buy multiple items from one seller, SMJ only charges you the $3 fee once and takes $1 off the processing fee for each item won (so if you won three 1000 items from the same seller, you'd pay the $3 wire fee + $6 for the first item + $5 for the second item + $4 for the third item).  One of Shopping Mall Japan's interesting features is that they have an office in Tokyo as well as in Indiana (I think it's in Michigan City but I'm not positive).  They bulk ship items via EMS from Tokyo office to the Indiana office so that you only end up spending a fraction of what you would normally.  So you ultimately end up paying for shipping three times - seller to SMJ's Tokyo office, SMJ's Tokyo office to SMJ's Indiana office and finally SMJ's Indiana office to you.  The hope is that this works out to being cheaper than shipping from Japan directly to you.

A lot of this is kind of confusing so I decided to do a bit of comparison shopping - I went looking for two items I was interested in for the same price by the same seller that were ending roughly the same time.  After a bit, I finally decided on two 1978 Calbee cards (one of Yasushi Tao and one of Tatsuhiko Kimura) for sale by (of all people) Mint Yokohama.  The cards were 500 yen a piece.  (NOTE - I would not normally buy something like this off of YJA unless I was buying some other things from the same bidder.  As you will see, the costs with the fees and the shipping will add quite a bit to the cost.)

Both proxy sites require that you pay a deposit before you can bid on anything.  This is to protect themselves from deadbeat buyers.  It's fairly easy to enter a deposit in kuboTEN - you go to the account management page (after you log in) and click on the "add funds" button in the deposit section.  You'll be taken to another page to enter the amount that you want to deposit, then taken to another page to actually make the payment.  You can pay either by PayPal or directly by credit card but either way you end up paying a 3.9% fee by their payment processor.  Once you pay the deposit, you are allowed to bid up to the amount of your deposit.

It's a little more complicated with Shopping Mall Japan.  You can pay a cash deposit via PayPal but you need to go to PayPal directly and send the money to SMJ's email along with a note with your user name.  You then have to wait until they credit your account with the deposit which could take a little while.  Once you have been credited with a cash deposit, you can build to (roughly) five times what your deposit was.  You can also do a credit authorization deposit using a credit card - I haven't done this but it appears that you can't do it directly on their website - you need to send them an email telling them how much to authorize.  Once a credit deposit is set up you can only bid up to the amount that's authorized.

Both proxy services offer ways to search Yahoo! Japan Auctions but I haven't used them much.  I generally search the auctions directly and once I find things I want to bid on I use each site's auction bid page.  I have to say that SMJ's page is much easier to deal with than kuboTEN's.  At SMJ, all I need to do is enter the URL of the page I want to bid on along with the amount I want to bid (you actually enter that on a second page after SMJ has looked at the url).  At kuboTEN, I need to enter the name of the auction site (kuboTEN also supports bidding on mbox and Rakuten Auctions), the url, the title of the auction, the auction id and the amount you want to bid.  (I asked Craig at kuboTEN why I had to fill all that in - basically he said that if you used kuboTEN to search YJA directly, I'd be able to bid very easily - the page I'm using was really meant for the other auction sites.  Since I don't like the lack of flexibility in kuboTEN's auction browser, I'm going to continue to do it this way).

So let's get down to the comparison.  I did a 1000 yen deposit at kuboTEN and a $10 deposit at SMJ.  Each of the cards sold for 500 yen.  I used the remaining deposit on each account to pay for some of the fees.  Here's the totals for kuboTEN:

Item	Amount In Yen	Amount In $	Notes
Deposit	1039	10.53	PayPal fee of 39 yen.  PayPal used exchange rate of 98.733 yen = $1
Auction, Domestic shipping and fees	686	6.92	Domestic shipping was 100 yen. Fees were 1060 yen (1000 yen plus 10% of 600 yen). Total including auction price was 1660 yen. I paid 1000 of that using the deposit so I needed to pay 660 yen. I had to pay 26 yen PayPal fee on that also. PayPal used an exchange rate of 99.23 yen = $1.
International Shipping	229	2.31	kuboTEN gave me three options for shipping - surface(I think), SAL and EMS. Surface was the cheapest but SAL was only about 40 yen more and roughly 1000 yen less than EMS, so I went with SAL for 220. Once again, I had to pay an extra "PayPal fee" of 9 yen. PayPal used an exchange rate of 99.22 yen = $1.
Total		19.76

Here are the totals for Shopping Mall Japan:

Item	Amount In Yen	Amount In $	Notes
Deposit		10.00
Auction, Domestic shipping and fees		7.55	The fee for the auction was $9 ($3 "wire" fee plus $6 "processing"). The shipping charge was 330 yen - this was both the domestic shipping to SMJ's office and my portion of the "bulk" shipping to the US. More on this below. SMJ uses a 97 yen = $1 exchange rate so they charged me a total of $8.55 for the auction price (500 yen) and the shipping. So the total price for item plus fees was $17.55. I used the deposit to pay for some of it so I only needed to pay an additional $7.55
Final Shipping		4.05	More on this below
Total		21.60

So Shopping Mall Japan was almost two dollars more than kuboTEN.  The bulk of the difference appears to be in the shipping costs.  They charged me 330 yen for shipping from the seller to their Tokyo office and then from the Tokyo office to Indiana.  This seemed somewhat high to me.  When I asked them how much the bulk shipping fee was, they said it was only 30 yen, implying that shipping from the seller to the office was 300 yen.  I pointed out to them that the auction said that domestic shipping was only 100 yen (which is what kuboTEN paid but I didn't tell them that part).  I did not get an answer back from them on that.  Even more ridiculous, however, was the final shipping from Indiana to my house.  I requested first class, expecting that it would be a dollar or so to ship the single card in a padded envelope.  Instead, I was charged $4.05 for a box roughly four inches on a side.  Once you make your shipping request, SMJ goes ahead and ships your item before you get a chance to argue the price so at that point I had to just pay it.

I took pictures of the box:

The other thing that SMJ does that I didn't like here is decide what the exchange rate should be.  They used an exchange rate of 97 yen = $1 so my auction price and shipping cost of 830 yen was $8.55.  If I had gotten the same rate that I had been getting from PayPal (about 99 yen = $1), it would have been about $8.38.  Not a huge difference for this particular item but for a more expensive item, this could end costing a couple of dollars.

The auctions ended on July 24.  I received the card from SMJ on August 6th.  I did not receive the card from kuboTEN until August 19th. kuboTEN had shipped the card the morning of July 29th (Japan time) so took almost 3 weeks for the card to get to me which is a little long for most shipments I get of this type.   I suspect that for whatever reason, the card got held up in customs.

I mentioned before that I would not normally have bought these two cards this way - I would have bought both of them through one site or the other.  I thought it might be interesting to see how much I would have paid if I had used each site to buy both cards.  We're going to use the same deposits and assume that the shipping costs would have been the same in both cases.  For kuboTEN, the auction cost would have been 1100 yen, so the fee would have been 1210 yen (1000 for the first item, 100 for the second and 110 for the 10% of the auction cost).  The total would have been 2310 yen.  I would have paid 1000 of that using my deposit, so I would have sent a second payment of 1310 which (with a fee of 3.9%) would have been about $13.75 (using an exchange rate of 99 yen = $1).  We're assuming shipping would have been the same so for a total we sum up the deposit ($10.53), the second payment ($13.75) and the international shipping ($2.31) and get a total of $26.59.  For SMJ, we'd be paying the $3 "wire" fee, $6 for the processing of the first item and $5 for the processing of the second item plus 1330 yen for the items plus the shipping.  At their exchange rate of 97 yen = $1, that 1330 yen becomes $13.71.  Add in the $4.05 final shipping and we get a total of $31.76.  So it would have cost almost $5 more to have used SMJ.

So in wrapping this up, I have to say that I think kuboTEN is the better way to go.  They end up being a little cheaper and they really seem to have cleared up the issues that I had had with them in the past.  Really the only thing that I like about Shopping Mall Japan is the ease of entering a bid.  I did get the card faster via SMJ but I think that may have been a fluke.  I think kuboTEN's site is much easier to deal with when I need to pay for something.  kuboTEN is also much better at sending emails to let you know something has happened, like your item has been received.  I have never gotten an email from SMJ telling me my item had been received - I have only discovered it by checking my account page on their site.  Most importantly, I have never felt like kuboTEN has done silly things with shipping that ended up costing me more money.

I'm going to notify both sites about this post and invite them to respond.  I'll publish any emails I get from them here.