The Bad and the Good on Yahoo!Japan

[Curran]

Monday morning and just cruising Yahoo!Japan while taking a work break..

Coffee in hand.

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There is no debating that Yahoo!Japan has become a much more dangerous place than it once was. Shilling bidding is the normal, and the ratio of fake crap to okay finds is up up up.

The only good online auction find I had this year was on eBay of all places, though I did pick one decent one off of Yahoo!Japan.

 

I'm saddened to see that a long time seller on Yahoo!Japan who often had nice lower end 'Catch, Study, Release' pieces has spent the last 6 months to 1 year increasingly listing heavily doctored or fake tsuba. He currently has an Owari up one now that is straight out of the Japan secret tobacco+tea+furniture stain dip.

 

On the flipside, there is one of those 'dilettante' Nobuiye up. I'll have to hit the kinko Meikan later and see if it is the 'Akasaka Nobuiye' or 'Echizen Nobuiye'. I went through a phase early on in collecting when I enjoyed these. They are decent tsuba with nice iron. Anyone want to have a go at it, be my guest. Price is very fair at $100. Usually they go for several hundred.

https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/h1017758356

[Stephen]

Humm so you can buy off Yahoo? I thought they didn't sell to gaijin, why I use buyee.

[Curran]

I had a good deputy service, but they closed down at the end of 2019. I switched to the Hong Kong owned arselickers at Buyee.com , and they were bad.

Didn't we have a thread on how much they sucked?  They keep refusing to close my account, and keep sending me emails no matter how much I -unsubscribe-.

Man, they lick the toe cheese off of goats.

 

I eventually switched to another service that is okay. Got some quirks, but none of the BS of Buyee.

I use them more to buy things like a modern potter whose work I've collected a little for 7 years, and sometimes a vintage sukajan. Sometimes a shot at a tsuba, but very rarely.

Yahoo!Japan is more entertainment value these days.

[Rivkin]

95% of things sold are problematic and the market is noticeably more expensive than it used to be... at least my personal impressions.

[PNSSHOGUN]

Good for some niche things, always need to be skeptical and informed though. There is almost no recourse for refunds/returns from the buying services either.

[PietroParis]

I bought a few items of pottery through buyee this year and I have no major complaints. At the price level I'm considering, however, fees+shipping+taxes can easily double the total price.

[Curran]

3 hours ago, PietroParis said:

I bought a few items of pottery through buyee this year and I have no major complaints. At the price level I'm considering, however, fees+shipping+taxes can easily double the total price.

 

Part of why I quite using them. They kept screwing up the Customs.

None of the other deputy services I worked with would screw it up like Buyee.

[PietroParis]

So far I only bought 20th/21st-century stuff, but I have indeed been wondering how to get them to declare the correct tariff code in case of antiques.

[paul tsubadotinfo]

Can someone post the link to the buyee discussion? Would like to know why they would be expensive, as far as I understand from the page it only costs 300 Yen per purchase, or did I get that wrong?

[PietroParis]

It's not just Buyee, it is the whole process. Their compulsory fees are 300 JPY "service fee" and 200 JPY "payment fee", adding up to 500 JPY. Additional packaging services (which I usually avoid) can cost up to 500 JPY for a single package. Consolidating packages when you buy multiple items can help reduce the shipping costs, but comes with an additional fee (a multiple of 500 JPY) that depends on the number of packages. Then you need to pay the shipping from the seller to the Buyee warehouse, generally around 1000 JPY for small parcels. Then you need to pay the shipping from the Buyee warehouse to your country (assuming you don't live in Japan, otherwise there is no point in buying through Buyee what you can get directly from Yahoo! Japan). For France this amounts to 2500-3500 JPY, depending on the carrier, for a small package. Then you need to pay VAT and possibly customs fees, to which the carrier (e.g. DHL or FedEx) will add a handling fee of their own. To give you an example, a guinomi that I had bought for a nominal price of about 28 EUR ended up costing me about 71 EUR, and that only after I got a reimbursement of an excessive handling fee applied by FedEx (they had made me pay to "unblock" the package from the customs more than they eventually billed in the invoice).

[Curran]

In my experiences, BUYEE did a particularly crappy job declaring for Customs.

I quickly came to realize I'd be paying an extra +10% to +18% on items. Any attempt to file against it was met by a DHL service charge almost always equal the amount I was fighting. Lose-lose, so avoid Buyee.

 

 

[PietroParis]

I never bought antiques through Buyee thus I cannot comment on their customs declarations. OTOH, in Catawiki purchases I had problems with both DHL and EMS+Chronopost, where they did not apply the reduced VAT rate even though their own invoice for the customs payment had correctly identified the tariff code for antiques. DHL eventually refunded me, whereas Chronopost (a parcel service of the French Post) told me that I should bring the issue to the seller, who would bring it to EMS, who would bring it to Chronopost, who would refund EMS, who would refund the seller, who would eventually pass on the refund to me. Since the sum was not worth the effort I gave up, but I must confess that I was not very nice to the person on the other end of the phone line...

[Jean]

I had the same experience Pietro.🤬

[Spartancrest]

Jauce [https://www.jauce.com/] has many of the same listings as Yahoo and Buyee - I have found their site easy to navigate but the fee system is a big drain on the pocket, having said that I have purchased a great deal of items at a quarter of the price of ebay and other auction sites - including several good buys at 1 yen would you believe. Jauce allows you to describe your own purchases as far as customs is concerned, I have never had a problem with any antique purchase other than with swords or offensive weapons. Tosogu and Koshirae can be shipped easily.