How many lines of code is Candy Japan? (2016) | Hacker News Reader

How many lines of code is Candy Japan? (2016)

candyjapan.com

85 pointsEndXA21 comments

This reminds me of a competitor "candysan.com". It is owned by a Japanese woman and her French husband who happens to be a youtuber. And the website is currently down because the servers burnt with the OVH Strasburg datacenter.

He made some non-technical videos talking about it. Apparently there was no backup and was considering moving part of the site to Shopify (stripe is used for payment).

The youtube channels are Ici Japon Corp. and icijapon but it is only in French.

Damn, not even a local copy? How so?

"Because of the coronavirus situation, Candy Japan is currently on pause."

Same story for many businesses shipping from Japan at the moment. Japan Post has shut down most of the usual avenues for shipping overseas from Japan, leaving only cost prohibitive international courier and freight forwarding options available.

Because of misplaced fears of fomite-based covid-19 infection vectors?

Because there are no flights for airmail to travel on. We have the same problem in HK since the border is almost completely closed. We can only send mail by ship to most destinations unless it's couriered.

I had assumed commercial flight operators would have MacGyvered passenger aircraft to handle things like this by now, to get some kind of revenue stream. I guess the economics didn't work out.

Edit: This is also nicely illustrated by Fedex stock almost tripling in value since the beginning of the pandemic.

I believe there are some passenger airplanes with seats taken out for cargo but I have no idea how widespread that is or how much of the regular cargo traffic it can actually replace.

https://www.aircargonews.net/freighters-world/how-coronaviru...

One specific postage option I noticed Japan Post had cancelled was the "surface air lift" which is a kind of middle-option between airmail (fast, expensive) and seamail (very slow, cheap). My assumption is that this was partly because if there's less capacity on planes then you might as well use it all for expensive airmail rather than cheaper SAL. But I've not investigated whether this is really true.

I think more generally trying to jury-rig cargo on a passenger plane isn't economic -- IIRC early last year some companies did a bit of it when passenger air travel was essentially zero, but they've all stopped now because (a) the cost effective way to fly cargo is to use cargo planes and (b) air passenger travel picked up a little again.

Global shipping is all sorts of fucked right now.

Sent cards to friends in Australia from US east coast, was told they’d be there in 3 weeks if I was lucky.

Candy Japan guy here. Japan Post announced that there will be price increases, which seemed to more than double the shipping cost. Even if I could ship (haven't checked lately if they opened yet or not), the service would need to change. Probably going from twice a month to once a month while still costing the same, so not sure how attractive that would be to subscribers.

While the site was down I started working on some other projects which are looking promising, so I'm dragging my feet a little bit about restarting it (I already refunded everyone's candy balances in case I never restart). Since I spent 10 years curating candy I also got a little bit tired towards the end to be honest.

I should probably make some use of the organic traffic it's getting though. I've actually had more traffic from Google after I could no longer ship. Thinking of selling one-time boxes on the site instead of subscriptions, as I could then spend the time I used to spend on curation on new projects instead.

> Japan Post announced that there will be price increases, which seemed to more than double the shipping cost.

That seems sort of fair, given the situation.

I'm curious - do you think Japan Post subsidized foreign package shipment fees (before the pandemic)?

It's dramatically more expensive to ship stuff from Sweden to Japan, than in the opposite direction, as an example.

I think the JP to US prices increased specifically, and more than any other price increases Japan post might have made. Japan Post removed the US from an existing shipping zone and marked it as its own shipping zone with higher prices. I have a statement from a US shipping provider (PirateShip) about the increase of outgoing USPS shipping prices that likely also explains the increase of incoming international mail as well:

> In late 2019, the US government threatened to pull out of the "Universal Postal Union," which is the international treaty that sets what postal services pay each other to trade mail & packages. This started a negotiation where the USA required the ability to "self-declare" the shipping rates it would charge other countries, instead of them being set by the treaty. This resulted in other countries "self-declaring" rates, too... all of which made international shipping through USPS way more expensive than it already was.

So, it's directly caused by china using the USPS as e-commerce driver ( subsidized shipping by the western world), which caused the US to back out.

It's an old union and it didn't take e-commerce into account. For better or worse, something had to change.

Have you considered setting up a distributor/forwarder in the US? The only relatively fast services I know of operating from Japan to the US right now (DHL + FedEx Priority Intl) are expensive for sure, but the prices become more economically feasible at larger parcel sizes and weights. Shipping one large batch to the US and then splitting packages there might be an option. (Japan Post Seamail is also an option (as the only available offering right now from JP), but currently takes 2-3 months to arrive).

I import a good number of items from Japan as a small business. Happy to chat more about the little context I have about both JP->US shipping and US domestic.

FWIW I don't want candy twice a month but I would be interested in something that came every six months or yearly. Twice a month just seems like a _lot_ of candy.

One time boxes sounds good to me. Being able to send someone a nice little present would be great.

There's a lot of anxiety for me surrounding monthly boxes.

Hearing this makes me sad. I had a subscription for maybe 9 months before everything shut down and I definitely miss it. It made my honeymoon in Japan more enjoyable, as we would try to find our favorite items from your boxes in convenience stores. I've tried other services, but frankly they're not good.

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Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12611721 (2016)

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