I’m in the US but I have recently fallen down the rabbit hole of Japanese Pokemon arcade games, and now I want to get a ton of the different tokens featuring my favorite whale. From what I’ve seen Mercari Japan has had both the best selection and best prices, but almost all of the proxy services I checked out have a per item or per store fee that really adds up when I’m looking at nearly 20 listings from various sellers.
Has anyone found any good proxies that don’t have a per item fee, or maybe use a percentage based fee? Even at the low end I’d be paying more on fees for some of these than on the actual item, and while it’d still be cheaper than what’s on eBay I’d like to avoid doing that if at all possible. I’ve never bought stuff from Japan like this but it feels like the best way I can get these kinds of Ga-Ole/Mezastar/Battrio/Tretta tokens, if I can avoid tacking on dozens of fees that is.
Also on a related note, does anyone have tips for locating tokens that are not on Mercari? I want to try to get one of every Kyogre if possible, but some of these tokens I’ve only ever seen as images on Bulbapedia. I’m not sure where to look if they don’t show up on eBay, Meracari, or any of the other shopping sites.
I normally use Buyee for my proxy purchases in Japan, but I recently found another proxy business that has the exact feature you want (i.e. can waive fees on a lot of small items), on a limited-use basis. There are some small things to keep in mind, but I’ve now used the service once and am waiting on my first package to arrive.
The proxy is Doorzo. For your specific purpose, they may be the best at the moment, as they currently are running a promotion for a coupon that waives the proxy fee. It seems they’ve been running it for most of the summer, and on the banner of the site, it says the site will deliver you one of these coupons every week—not sure when the delivery of these coupons will end though (the current one is valid until 8/16, and then maybe another will come up or maybe not). For most sites, this coupon is nice, but not all that useful, since it’s a single-use coupon, so you waive the fee for one item/listing at most. For whatever reason, Doorzo allows you to apply the coupon to an entire cart. So you can line up 10 purchases from Mercari in one cart and check the whole cart out at once and waive the proxy fee on all purchases. This does mean that you’ll need to store up listings of interest and purchase them all at once, rather than as you find them, though.
This, for example, was a cart of 7 Mercari items, each with a 200-yen service fee. The entire cart’s proxy service fee (1400 yen) was waived as I used the abovementioned coupon on the entire cart.
I have run into zero need to reach out to customer service during my one use of Doorzo, so I don’t want to advocate too strongly for it, given my limited experience. But here are some other things to keep in mind:
Consolidation is only free for the first 10 items. Then I think it was a 100 yen/item fee after that?
Free warehouse storage is up to 60 days.
The cart feature also allows you to access other coupons that might not be available to you on other sites. E.g. If Doorzo has a 1000 yen off 8000 yen purchase on Mercari, as long as your whole cart reaches that 8000-yen threshold, you can apply the coupon (only one coupon per purchase). This is useful for still being able to extract the value of available coupons without needing to purchase one “expensive” item.
Their proxy fee seems to somewhat adjust for the cost of the item, so I’ve seen it vary from 200-300 yen per item
If you have any items <500 yen, I think it automatically disqualifies the item (or consolidated package containing said item) for ECMS shipping, which generally turns out to be cheaper than EMS, as far as I’m aware. This is true anywhere and not specific to Doorzo. Just something to keep in mind if you’re purchasing cheap listings.
The site is also harder to navigate, as it’s entirely in Japanese. So additional information on other aspects/services may be a bit more difficult to find.
The site is integrated with Mercari, meaning purchases on Doorzo are automatically and instantly handled on Mercari. There isn’t anyone manually purchasing the listings.
Bidding on YJA looks kind of annoying. I didn’t spend too much time trying to figure it out, but you may have to pre-buy “bids” that will allow you to place bids up to a certain amount. It looked clunky, so if you have any bidding that you actually have to do, this proxy service may not be the best for that.
Let me know if you have any questions, and I’ll try to answer them to the best of my ability.
Good luck!
Regarding this, the best you can do is maybe build connections with other non-TCG collectors or just wait patiently for items to show up on these Japanese sites over time. Patience goes a long way!
Wow, Doorzo actually sounds incredible! They didn’t come up in my searches at all but from what I’m seeing they have a ton of good reviews.
Did you run into any additional fees after the 1400 that the coupon covered? Also what was shipping like, if you don’t mind me asking? I know that’s going to depend on several factors but I’d like to try and get an idea of what that could look like since I’m new to this whole thing.
Thank you, I really appreciate the suggestion! It’s looking like this could be the one I go with.
I did a bit of due diligence when I was checking it out, as I hadn’t heard of it before either. I think it is relatively new, but I remember seeing good reviews and the process seemed similar enough to how other proxys work, so nothing seemed shady or out of the ordinary.
My first and only shipment with Doorzo was a total of 17 items, so I did end up running into their 100-yen/item consolidation fee (for every item over 10 items), and if I remember right, I opted into a couple optional shipping fees since I wasn’t sure how they would pack the items after removing the outer packaging. The extra shipping protections were extremely cheap though. I can check when I get home, but I think it was like 220 yen for some extra protection for the package (or extra support in the box or something?) and 100 yen for bubble wrap around each individual item, which seemed like a no-brainer given the price (100 yen total for all items, not each item). I don’t recall running into any unexpected or surprise fees when I was doing the final checkout for shipping the package.
I’ll hopefully be receiving my package tomorrow (or it might have to be in a month, if nothing else goes wrong , since I’ll be away from home for a bit), so I can comment on how they packaged the items then.
If you’re curious about shipping costs, packages I’ve shipped from Buyee with a good amount of small items (similar to what you might be looking to do) generally fall into the range of $20-60 for shipping, I think with most of them falling around the $30-40 range. (This is to the US). If this is your first time, there are also some nuances between the different shipping methods that might be useful to know. Things like:
ECMS shipping not being available if you have any items in the package under 500 yen
EMS seeming to mostly avoid any additional tariff costs (for me, my recent ECMS seemed to avoid tariffs too, but this may be different based on different locations)
EMS goes through USPS (and I think you have to sign for the package?)
ECMS generally using a lesser-known carrier for the final leg of delivery (e.g. UniUni)
Registered Air (I think that’s what the service is called?) is basically a registered mail package, I think. So this is also USPS and will require a signature on delivery
etc.
Be happy to answer as many questions as you have, as I know setting up the first proxy purchase can be a bit nervewracking
Oh awesome! I hope everything works out and you get your order safe and sound, I’d definitely be interested in hearing how it turns out!
Thank you, I do have few more questions actually. As I’m adding things to cart it’s offering Item Inspection, Pre-storage Photos, Authentication, etc. Did you go for any of those add-ons or just leave that optional stuff off? I’m also curious about what the process after ordering looked like. Do you get updates as packages arrive then pay packing and shipping once they consolidate everything? And I guess this last one is more of a personal choice, but did you encounter any “Shipment not insured” warnings and, if you did, what did you do? Buy it anyway, find a different listing, etc.
For the small stuff it sounds like you’re picking up, getting any of those services is really just burning money. No seller is scamming people over random small non-TCG items. I don’t make purchases of more expensive, popular items like, for example, Japanese Gold Stars, so I’ve hardly ever made use of the item inspection services for any proxy site. If you end up purchasing things where you may be at risk of being scammed, you’ll also just want to thoroughly understand what protections these services actually confer, as some of them may not protect you (i.e. let you get your money back) as much as you might think.
After purchasing, one very minor qualm I had with Doorzo is that they send you messages about when items are purchased and when they arrive in your account on the actual website, but the messages don’t go through directly to your email (or maybe that’s a feature that I haven’t turned on). I do appreciate that Buyee sends an email your way when item orders are successful and then when items arrive (and also when your free storage time on any particular item is running out). But Doorzo seems to be a bit more hands-off regarding this. It’s easy enough to just check the website’s “In progress” page once in a while to see when items come in though, so it wasn’t a terrible bother not to be directly notified.
Once all the items you want to consolidate have arrived, you can put in a work order for consolidation of the package, including any extra protection you might want to include, and will be asked to pay for shipping of the consolidated package on the spot (with shipping cost estimates available to you). This is a little different from Buyee, who separates the consolidation step and the shipment step (i.e. you can only proceed with shipment selection after they complete consolidating your package). Consolidation for both Buyee and Doorzo is a permanent penultimate step, meaning they generally don’t allow for adjustment of the package after that (if you want to add one more item that wasn’t in the original consolidation order, for example). It can get a bit nervewracking if you’re still ordering in items as the free storage time on some of your earlier items is running out, so you need to plan to stop ordering at some point if you don’t want to risk having to ship out two packages (or pay for extended storage on items).
I think I remember seeing that “shipment not insured” warning on Doorzo. I think that refers to there not being insurance for the domestic shipping from the seller to Doorzo’s warehouse. Personally, I wouldn’t be bothered by this message, as the domestic lost-package rate is probably very low, and I generally am ordering relatively inexpensive items. So, in case something does goes awry (which I haven’t run into yet in my experiences using proxy purchasing), I’m not out that much money anyway. If you start to purchase more expensive items, you might have to sit back and figure out what your risk tolerance is and how some of these services or things like insurance may or may not affect your decision to purchase or not.
The package arrived today! And everything looks okay.
I don’t think I’ll have time to look through everything until I get back, but it looks like, for pretty much all of the flats, they left the original package/envelope as it was shipped from the seller and just wrapped that in one layer of bubble wrap. I thought they said they would remove all outer packaging, but maybe that’s just in the case of bulky items and not flats (where removing the outer packaging wouldn’t really accomplish much anyway). And I did end up having to sign for EMS, in case that’s useful information for you.
In the end, it seems everything went smoothly for my first package from them
Yay! I’m glad everything worked out for you! (Though them wrapping the flat envelopes in bubble wrap does seem a bit silly.)
I just put in my order so I have my fingers crossed that everything will go well . It wouldn’t let me buy more than 10 items at once so I had to split up my cart and use two coupons, but honestly that was fine since I had both the weekly no fees coupon and a second as a new user bonus.
I was able to find most of the tokens I wanted and even one of the old Mega Bloks sets I never thought I’d see in the wild, so I’m super excited to get those. Some of the missing tokens are on eBay too so I have routes towards them, after that I think there will only be two more normal tokens and a handful of variants left for me to find.
Awesome! It always feels like Christmas when you finally receive the package from Japan
In hindsight, the bubble wrap was probably not that useful, since the sellers in Japan tend to pack their items well enough anyway. But 200 yen is also not a lot, so I may still get it in the future if I use Doorzo again.
, since I’ll be away from home for a bit), so I can comment on how they packaged the items then.
. It wouldn’t let me buy more than 10 items at once so I had to split up my cart and use two coupons, but honestly that was fine since I had both the weekly no fees coupon and a second as a new user bonus.