but that wouldn’t be true in Japan right? Like, if you were living in Japan and capable of using Yahoo Auctions JP legitimately as yourself, you’d be able to utilize Yahoo Auctions JP’s buyer protection.
I definitely agree tho - it would be nice to be able to just buy that on ebay and call it a day. this is why I think Yahoo Auctions JP is missing big time on not being an international marketplace… the market for buyers is there and ready, they are just completely whiffing on the buyer protection and logistics piece.
I wonder why the seller wouldn’t just list it on ebay? If it’s true (which I believe) it would fetch tens of thousands more there, there’d be no reason not to?
That’s a good question, I’m not sure but I’d bet because that causes the opposite issue. Right now the seller is in a better spot, whereas a Japanese person selling in the US is at the mercy of shipping and the buyer has protection.
It is also going to be interesting to see what the Japanese Market values this at right now. Last I saw the buylist in Japan was 25k so you’re right, the final buyer might be from Japan.
The even more obvious question is:Why didn’t the seller grade a card like this already? Why is it not sealed anymore but not yet graded? Especially now that PSA has a satellite office in Japan since 2018? Selling the card raw instead of sealed or graded is the worst of the 3 options, as it creates the most doubt about the condition of the card, hence it has the highest probability of fetching a low price. Why would a seller make that decision?
Edit: Maybe they don’t want to get out of their comfort zone, admittedly.
AFAIK, Yahoo Auctions JP doesn’t provide any buyer protection (even for buyers located in Japan). Someone please correct me if I’m wrong (which I wish I’m).
@kingboo64, I find that hard to believe. If it was some small fish card, maybe. But someone who’s in possession of both Espeon and Umbreon in this day and age is bound to have heard of grading
There is very limited “buyer protection” which is nothing like what we have in the west. I did some more research on the buyer protection policies and here’s what I found. As I mentioned above, Yahoo acts as a payment intermediary. Payment first goes to them, and then the seller ships the item. Once the item arrives, the buyer confirms receipt, and Yahoo irreversibly pays the seller. If the seller sends something completely different or the item never arrives, I believe Yahoo can withhold payment to the seller and facilitate some kind of exchange between buyer and seller to work something out. However, the seller can simply deny the request and be paid anyways. Then the buyer would have to go through a convoluted support process to be entitled to a refund which caps at 10,000 JPY. Getting a return or refund almost entirely relies on buyer-seller communication. But many sellers will explicitly say they won’t engage in any kind of negotiation process if the item isn’t as described: “no claim, no return.”
I think a major reason we’re seeing dissatisfaction here is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Japanese market, Japanese auction sites, and even Japanese culture (as evidenced with the “why don’t JP sellers just list on eBay/PSA grade it” talk). I don’t want to sound like I’m talking down to people, but if you educate yourself on the workings of the Japanese market, things will make a lot more sense.
Pkonno has graded some of his cards. He probably doesn’t grade them all because he has a lot more than we’d think. The pop going up significantly would give us an idea of how many extras he has. It’s in his best interest to keep that secret to give the illusion that every copy he sells could be his last.
Oh, wow. A meager selection indeed.
When exactly was that? Also, do you remember which store the picture was taken in? I don’t recognize that style of price tag.
this is super helpful and insightful. I do wonder how this still exists in 2021 tbh, considering how easy it would be to scam someone with this. I would think buyers AND sellers would seek out further protection and potential profit by wanting to sell on sites like ebay.
It sounds like what you’ve described is effectively glorified craigslist.
The other thing I wonder - why do any of these middlemen take Paypal? The whole idea of paypal, from its inception, is buyer protection on e commerce. If that’s fundamentally different than how Yahoo Auctions works, or Japanese Culture works, why would they accept it? It’s pretty much setting themselves up for failure where people like me, and others here, expect a certain amount of buyer protection for all ecommerce.
I was just looking at their transaction graph, and it seems like the weakness in the middleman service is the fact that once the item is received by the buyer, they pay the buyer. Buyee has to do this when it gets to their warehouse, which is why they do stuff like the “inspection” - to make sure the item is what the seller sold. Once they inspect it, the seller gets paid via yahoo auctions and the idea of reversing this transaction when you the actual buyer gets it seems pretty impossible. Even if you ask Buyee to take photos of the items after it is received, they transaction is basically done at that point.
IMO Buyee needs to bulk up their inspection offering before paying the seller. I believe they should offer some paid service like - I will pay $100 to be able to facetime with a buyee staff and look at the card before they mark it received. or I would pay $15 to get extensive photos of everything and confirm what the item is.
Basically yes, it’s glorified craigslist. But Japanese culture is less individualist than here in the west, so there’s lesser prevalence of scams. There obviously still are some, but the vast majority of sellers are well-meaning. And it’s honestly great for sellers, while I love eBay buyer protection as a buyer, it’s really bad as a seller when people can return items because they didn’t like the phase of the moon when they arrived. You can still get removed for low feedback, so any scams are likely to be short-lived and established sellers are going to be trustworthy.
You already see the movement away from PayPal from some middleman services like Zenmarket, as discussed previously. People have been using the PayPal purchase protection as a get out of jail free card on big purchases and Zenmarket doesn’t like that. So they want the second payment method to avoid this. But for bigger sites like Buyee, it’s another payment option which can be pre-authorized and a lot of their customers want it. But if there keeps being chargebacks from Westerners, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a shift.
To get even more meta, I wonder how these drop shippers in Japan, who relist items on yahoo auctions or mercari jp on ebay, deal with ebay buyer protection.
Maybe that’s just part of their COGS… they list for 20% more and sometimes have to eat the card if someone on ebay returns it and bank on that rarely happening.
I’m not a competitive player, so I don’t know if it might be because of its playability. Or maybe… Is it just demand?
I know the art is awesome, but I’m surprised that the Japanese version is so expensive in comparison to the English version. And it’s quite a modern card.
Wow!!! I didn’t know it was so hard to pull those. It makes much more sense now. Thank you very much! Do you think I should wait to pull the trigger on this one? (I know it’s just an opinion and I’m the one to make the decision, just curious to know if anyone who’s been watching these has more insight than me)
I believe Japan recently had a small restock of the set, but I’m not 100% sure. In general it’s out of character for Japan to restock sets like this, especially since it’s one of those end-of-era special themed sets with a GX in every pack. Given the pull rate especially and the fact that it’s a really nice artwork + two very popular Pokemon, this is one I would say is more likely to at least hold in price than to drop in the future. Like you said this is just an opinion of course. I would say that if you want the art and you aren’t trying to complete the set that an English one will do you perfectly fine. Since it was a collection box promo they’re still like $10 or less, but as that product ages more I think that has a lot of room to go up too. For $10 you get a beautiful card though, not much to lose.
