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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

Buyee is great! Bought a lot of stuff through them. Electronics, clothes, blurays, even food lol (shio kombu is still not very common outside of Japan). Never had a problem!

The only downside if you buy electronics with batteries: Buyee strictly enforces a maximum 2 batteries per package rule. So for example a Nintendo Switch would be shipped in 2 package because it has 3 batteries, 1 in the tablet, and 1 in each joycon. Have to plan around that when buying multiple electronics https://faq.buyee.jp/article/99?lang=en (look for items without battery, “unit only” etc)

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T recently got my first proxy service shipment via Buyee, and I feel like the total price came out a good bit above what I was expecting, possibly to the point of it just being worth paying Japanese sellers inflated eBay prices for some things.

Buyee seem to love nickel and diming on package inspection fees and packing materials when consolidating (they're presumably already safely packed by the seller? just put it in a box for me), then supposedly have in some cases opened sealed items etc. Then even though they charged for the individual items on checkout, they seemed to bill for Japanese domestic shipping for everything only once you picked shipping for the final package? Very confusing and hard to keep track of.

On Mercari it’s more about reaching the domestic market which will not ship outside of the islands. Buyee helps with that so you can buy items otherwise never showing up on eBay

I've bought stuff thru sendico as well. Only thing I don't like about em is their weird credit system that you have to top up before a purchase even though there's no way to predict shipping etc

I used them recently and I was half expecting to give them my money and never receive anything, but actually they were great and very helpful. No complaints at all.

Any tips for using it? Maybe I am trying to find the wrong things but every time I have tried to browse it confusing.

Should I be looking Amazon.jp and then buying on buyee?

Buyee is mostly used with Mercari https://jp.mercari.com/en

You can use it with Amazon.jp but most of the time Amazon ships directly to everywhere, no proxy needed

In fact you can use it with any japanese store that has a link to a product, the inquiry is free itself and Buyee reports back if they can buy it for you or not

If you use Discord then the Buyee server is very helpful https://discord.com/invite/YRg3DgkBpS

Amazon.jp does ship everywhere, but their international items use a separate warehouse, and sometimes items are only stocked in the domestic one(s) and are unavailable for international shipping.

You can get a proxy shipping address via Tenso (different service but iirc same company as Buyee) and then have stuff shipped there from Amazon.jp & consolidated and shipped to you.

I used it successfully for all the cheap and/or rare second hand books available on Japanese Amazons that Amazon will normally not ship internationaly (as its actually a miriad of small sellers listing the via Amazon and often only shipping domestically).

Thanks for the advice.

Just tried it. Pretty much anything in electronic measurement equipment comes with this red banner:

“This is a prohibited item. Therefore, it is unavailable.”

Thank you for saying that because I was eyeing a lot of 12 Nintendo DSs

You can actually ask Buyee to discard the batteries after they inspected the items (you can communicate with them while the order is in their warehouse) but they only do it if it’s easily removable. Otherwise you can end up in a situation where given your example they will give you 2 choices: 6 packages which will be very expensive or we cancel your whole order but at this point there are no returns

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