When using this site, and others like KuboTEN, who I am awaiting an order from, they charge you 1000JPY (~$10) per seller you buy from. So if you want seven cards from seven different sellers, you are paying $70 off the bat. The good things is that they will hold all your packages and ship them all at once so you can save on shipping. These sites require you to deposit money ahead of time to bid on items, similar to COMC, and I use PayPal. Since they are in Japan, they charge you JPY (Japanese Yen) which is less than the U.S. dollar at the moment so I make a little more on the exchange; unlike my more important monthly exchange from Korean Won to US dollars.
I decided to take photos of the packaging received from Noppin. I ordered 17 different Seung-Yeop Lee (이승엽) cards from different sellers. Keep in mind, you have to go by the pictures unless you can read Japanese, which I can not, though I use bad Google translator for assistance. The auction sites also use the translator so you don't have to cut and paste everything to a translator, but it may not always give you what you need. I decided to pay the $14 to ship via EMS instead of Air Mail.
In this order, I received two Yomiuri Playing Day cards of Lee with the Giants which are packaged inside a Giants postcard, some Calbee, BBM and Konami. I did read on one of the auctions that it said the card was dirty, but it was cheap so I bought it anyway. Upon closer inspection, the holographic card has surface smudges that can't be removed so I probably won't submit it to PSA but will look for a new copy.
Very cool....sounds like an awesome mail day! I used JAUCE for the longest time, but switched over to Buyee late last year when I discovered it was about 10-15% cheaper overall for me to use their service....not to mention some better features.
ReplyDeleteI will have to look at Buyee and see their commission prices. KuboTEN and Noppin seem pretty similar.
DeleteNoppin and JAUCE actually seem to be a bit cheaper than kuboTEN. I still need to look at Buyee as well.
DeleteIt appears Buyee charges for domestic shipping from each seller to their office as well as 150Y and 500Y per order grouping. Then you pay for shipping from them to you. Sounds expensive but I might try them once because of cards I want.
DeleteSumoMenkoMan has done some pretty intense studies on the best bang for your buck on all of them and I think his conclusion is that Buyee's the cheapest. That said, I keep using Noppin because I already have 2000 yen sitting with them as a deposit and the one time I went to use Buyee I couldn't figure out how to go about doing anything.
DeleteI compared Jauce, KuboTEN, Noppin and Buyee and made a spreadsheet with all their fees and charges. Then I took the price of auctions and incremented it out from Y500 to Y50000 in increments of Y500 to compare the companies at different auction hammer prices. I made a few assumptions on shipping across all the services and basically came up with the following conclusions:
DeleteNoppin is cheaper than Jauce for auctions under Y22500 hammer price.
KuboTEN is cheaper than Jauce for auctions under Y8000 hammer price.
Noppin is cheaper than KuboTEN for auctions under Y36500 hammer price.
Buyee is cheaper than Jauce by roughly 20% for cheaper auctions and 10% for more expensive auctions.
Buyee is cheaper than Noppin all around by about 10%
Buyee is cheaper than KubotTEN by roughly 15% for cheaper auctions and 10% for more expensive auctions.
It definitely gets tricky trying to decipher everything.
I added ~14 cards to the shopping cart on Yahoo Shopping on Buyee and it separated them into 3 different... sellers? Is it one shipping fee from each of those sellers to Buyee?
DeleteI asked these questions but no response yet.
I don't know the answer to that. I should have mentioned the above conclusions were from Yahoo Auctions only. I'm not sure about the other services like Shopping or Rakuten.
DeleteThose postcard/greeting card-style things are awesome - I love that they are holding a card within a card. I sure wouldn't mind seeing one of the American card companies try something different like that.
ReplyDeleteI actually cut these cards from the postcard so I could submit them to PSA. They were too difficult to pull from the slot openings. I will plan to buy new copies of each.
DeleteThese were released by Yomiuri themselves (maybe paid BBM to produce? or maybe not) and given away at games. But yes, would be nice if a card company did something similar.
Looking closely at these cards I pulled out of the postcard, they have indentations from where they were sitting in the card. I will still sub these and not worry about subbing again as damage will likely be the same. Just want to get them slabbed.
Delete