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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

BTW, I really like the concept of Candy Japan. But twice a month and $29 is too much. Hopefully they can get monthly or bi-monthly subscription soon.

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I registered Candy Japan. I wanted to try it once for that month. Their subscription system is a mess. I accidentally registered twice because there were no confirmation page or confirmation mail once you registered. Also there is no login screen on their page, their "manage subscription" page didn't show my account. So I registered twice and then thought it didn't work and forgot about it (should have check my bank).

Well, they billed me twice and sent me two candies, once I received my candies it was too late for next month too so I bought 4 candies in total.

I tried to de-register but site didn't work. When I tried to login:

"Sorry, could not find subscription or you had several."

What a stupid warning, it can't de-register me because I have two subscription, and it fails to give me any actual information.

Then I contacted support, told them to delete my account. They again failed and sent me more candies next month, I asked refund and they did give and successfully terminated my account after that.

Anyway, be careful if you only want to register for one month. Their system is so bad, I don't know if it is intended that way so people can accidentally buy more candy or they are just plain bad.

Agreed. I eventually cancelled because it was rare to receive two packages per month, more like one in one month, two in the next, three in the next, none for the month after that and so on. I lost track of how many packages I was supposed to have received vs. how many I did receive, which I'm sure was less than how many I was supposed to receive.

The other issues I had was with the general quality of the candy being shipped seemed to get lower and lower as time went on, somehow the "DIY candy" packs being favored over chocolates or sour candies, and whilst this wasn't much of an issue, the blog posts explaining what you were supposed to receive never seemed to be in line with what was actually delivered. Maybe the posts were posted a bit too early, or too late. The issue being that if you didn't get the package the blog post was talking about, you didn't know if the candy was suitable for vegans, vegetarians, and you had to guess your way through the DIY candy, ultimately resulting in a mess.

I'm sorry. If you didn't receive a complete refund for all the shipments you did not want, you can contact me at my personal email me@bemmu.com.

It is alright, I ate and shared extra candies. But you really should work on your login/registration system, instead of trying to solve NP problems.

The downside to being an engineer in the e-commerce space ;)

Engineers want to solve NP problems.

Customers want stuff to arrive on time and cheap.

I suspect shipping is the real problem. Here in Japan, while there are several shippers who give great service at low prices within the country, there are almost none that do the same for international shipping.

I live in rural Japan in a famous tea growing area. Many of my neighbours are tea growers. They are desperate for ways to export their tea cheaply. I briefly looked into helping them out, but shipping looked impossible. They will sell me 100g of first cut shincha for $3-5 (in vacuum packed foil packages even!). But shipping? It will raise the price 5-10x. I bet the vast majority of his price is shipping :-(

The way to ship internationally is by slow boat. It's super cheap. What you want to do is ship by the palette (or better by the container) and then have someone on the other side forward it on with local shipping. But that takes both volume and cooperation of another entity.

For a small 1-2 person operation, it's infeasible.

Exactly, especially now with yen being so expensive. For the past 6 months I've spent $29000 on candy and $26000 to ship it. If I used airmail with tracking it would cost 3 times as much.

How come I can order something fairly heavy from China for $3 with free shipping? Of course they do WAY more volume than Japan, but it still makes no sense, it costs me more than that to ship it across town, and it's literally the same guy doing the local delivery.

It really depends on the company you were dealing with. They almost certainly have someone stateside who are dealing with customs, picking up containers and unpacking them. With enough volume, it's quite doable.

Basically, for shipping by sea, weight is barely important. Volume is the most important thing. I forget how much it costs to ship a container (like those big containers you see at ship yards or on trains), but essentially it is little enough that cross atlantic/pacific is essentially free. If you have enough to fill up a container and you have someone who can do the paperwork on the other end, it is totally feasible.

I shipped my bicycles from England to Japan on a partial palette. I can't even remember how much I paid... Maybe $100. And that's for a third party shipping company that came to my door, wrapped my bike boxes, put them on a palette and found space in an unfilled container. The hitch? I had to go to the docks in Japan, fill in the paperwork, do the customs inspection, etc. It took me a whole day. To have someone else do the work for me on that side would have cost $1000.

If you can't receive large shipments, then they have you over a barrel and they will suck the money out of you. Probably there is a business opportunity there...

I forget how much it costs to ship a container

Order of magnitude: thing "new iPhone" not "new MacBook." If that leaves anyone flabbergasted, yep, that is why containerization is one of the most important technologies in the world.

And the current price may be even more surprisingly lower because we live through a period of shipping capacity glut, see the bankruptcy of Hanjin Shipping.

They abuse an old international mail agreement. When mail is sent between 2 countries, it might go through several countries and it becomes difficult to calculate costs and manage forwarders.

Since it was assumed that anyone who receives a letter would write back (mind you this was thought up way before online shopping in the 1860s) it would average out, so basically every nation in the world agreed to forward foreign mail for free, assuming it would average out. This only works for things that are send as mail and not as packages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union

All of the world's postal services have peering agreements, the same as for Internet traffic.

IIRC the Chinese government will subsidize exports from china.

> They will sell me 100g of first cut shincha for $3-5 (in vacuum packed foil packages even!).

To put this in perspective for those unfamiliar with green teas: 100g of a good shincha in the US would cost at least 3x that much. For example, Upton's, my favorite specialty tea retailer who has good prices, will sell you an excellent shincha (88th Night Shincha https://secure.uptontea.com/store/item.asp?itemID=TJ87 ) but 100g will cost $34 - excluding S&H (~$5).

BTW, If your neighbors are looking for a good way to sell tea, you should try pointing them over to Yunomi. I've met the guy who runs this site and he's very passionate about trying to help small Japanese growers:

http://yunomi.life/pages/about-yunomi

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