Proxies

Proxies are good, but you have to know what you are doing to minimize costs.  ZenMarket is great for buying from Yahoo! Auctions, since they are fully integrated and let you bid in real time and also set up sniper bids.  The other proxies you have to request a bid, then they place it when they get to it, so there is no late bidding or chance to bid if someone out bids you.  Everything is a 300 yen fee though.  If you buy one 50 yen card you pay the shipping to Zen, plus 300 yen fee on that item, making the cheapest things almost $5 a piece.  The fees can add up.  I think I wound up buying 17 CDs with the LEON card last night.  That would have been 18 fees if buying from Zen!  5400 yen!  Ridiculous.  So I wound up buying from another proxy called Tenso.  One last negative about Zen is that they are slow, and sometimes dense.  It seems like there is RNG when placing orders.  Sometimes it is ordered right away, sometimes it sit there, and other times it can sit there, then you get a message about the item, even though you gave them everything they needed.  This sucks when you are ordering things that could sell out (photobooks on Stardom's website) or are trying to buy things with a deadline date to order by (online autograph sessions).  One last thing is that sometimes the person selling the item will refuse to work with a proxy.  I have only had this issue with Zen because every time I have experienced it, it was from an auction I won.  I finally found someone selling the Cosmic Angels Guidebook on an auction (since Stardom didn't sell that one on their online store).  After winning the auction, and paying Zen for it, Zen informed me that buyer cancelled the sale...  (BTW Mina and Unagi were my favorites in TJPW.. I have a type I guess.  Natsupoi was also a favorite.  In fact Mina and Natsupoi were my 1 & 2, so it is still surreal to see either of those 3 wrestling my Stardom favorites, Momo & AZM).

With Tenso, when you enroll they give you a Japanese address to use.  Then you place any order you want, use that address as the shipping address, then pay for it with your credit or debit card.  Tenso will accept the items and let you know when they arrive.  Tenso has no fees to buy things, so there is only a fee to consolidate and ship your orders.  Consolidation fees are 200 yen plus 300 yen per box/order.  So if you order from 3 stores you are hit with a 1100 yen fee, then I think there is a small fee based on the overall total amount your order costs.  The negative about Tenso is that not every Japanese site will accept payment from a credit card with an international address.  I could not order Up Up Girls (P) photos from their store with my credit card, so I had to find yet another proxy...

The last proxy I use is White Rabbit Express.  This seems to be the most popular, but it is also not perfect.  The best things about WRE is that when you place an order they will buy it within 24-48 hours, sometimes less based on the day and time you order.  After you request to buy an item you are required to pay ASAP, including an estimated shipping charge.  This saves a step over Zen because you dont have to request an item, wait for them to come back to you with the price, pay it, wait for them to order it.  With WRE you just request the item and pay for it in one step, then they confirm they purchased it.  A negative, along with no easy access to placing bids on auction sites, is their fees.  They have a somewhat complicated sliding scale for their fees.  First, there is a 400 yen fee per shop you order from.  Then you get charged 100 yen per line item.  Finally you pay 9.9% on the total amount of your order in fees.  OR... You pay a flat $10 fee if the total of the previous fees does not total more than $10.  Sounds expensive, but there is a sweet spot where their fees can be cheaper overall than Zen's fees.

So what is best?  Depends on what you are getting, and how much you think you will be buying over time (every proxy only lets you keep items in their warehouse for a certain amount of days).

I use Tenso when I am buying lots of items at one time and I feel shipping them to me would be cheaper than the fees I would get from Zen, like 60+ cards.  If buying from one store I will only get the 200 yen fee when I go to request them to ship to me (plus shipping to me).  On WRE this would be 400 yen fee plus 60 100 yen fees plus 9.9% of whatever total that order was, so you are looking at $64 in fees PLUS the 9.9% THEN shipping to you..  For Zen it is 300 yen per item, so $180 in fees?  Yikes!  Lucky for me the Suruga site and Amazon JP accepted international credit cards so I could use Tenso!

I use WRE when there is something in limited quantity or on a short time limit from a site that does not accept international payment (UUG Shop, TJPW, DDT, Stardom) and I need to buy it NOW!  Since they process things quickly, I could probably purchase something today if they stopped selling it on Friday night.

For everything else I use Zen.  Overall I would not save much money from using the other places on most things, since I would then have to pay for an extra shipping charge to me.  It is rare that I am not waiting for a delivery of something to Zen, or don't already have something in their warehouse already (I buy a lot of autographed photos), so I save money by potentially paying more in fees by not needing to ship another package to my house from a different proxy.  Another reason I use Zen over the others is because a bunch of things I get through auctions.  For example, Stardom keychains were not available to order online (don't get me started about Stardom and their refusal to make everything the sell available online.  See the Cosmic Angels Guidebook story from above...).  I used Yahoo Auctions to buy them.

The only time I don't use Zen is when I use Tenso to buy a lot of items, or when I need to purchase something ASAP, and that site accepts my credit card (or uses paypal).  Then I will use WRE if it doesn't.

Confused yet?