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Auction deputy services- ordering from Yahoo auctions

Sander · 11109

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Offline Sander

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Auction deputy services are services that help you buy stuff from certain auction sites where you might not be able to buy yourself. I'm talking about the yahoo.co.jp auctions. There might be several reasons why you'd want to use and ADS.

1) There are some things that you can get (for a reasonable price) only from Japan- rare X (and other) stuff for example.
2) The sellers at Yahoo auctions usually don't sell outside Japan as they usually don't speak much English and don't want to bother with non-Japanese speaking people.
3) Without knowing Japanese, it's a bit difficult to browse the auctions, but the people who offer those services usually speak English and offer automated translations, ask questions from the sellers for you etc.

The service I'm talking about more closely is Crescent, which has been hosted successfully  for years by someone named Masamichi-san. There are also other service providers, like www.celga.com , www.rinkya.com , www.shoppingmalljapan.com etc.

The procedure at Crescent is like this: register as a user, log in and start browsing the auctions ("auction search/order"). There are direct links for more popular searches, other stuff is searched by keywords. The catch is that you should use Japanese characters when searching, if possible, as romaji usually doesn't give much results. So better find a place where to copy+paste the search keywords from. You can also just enter the URL to the auction you'd like to bid on.

When you have found the thing you are looking for, it's convenient to put it into your watch list and then pay a deposit money to take part in the auction (add deposit). The minimum sum is $50 which should allow you to bid for max 25,000YEN (when the auctions are over you'll get your deposit money back). You can use PayPal or a credit card to transfer the deposit. When the deposit has been transfered all you have to do is to make your bid by clicking order on the aucion page. The Crescent system makes your bids in real-time. By the way, different users of Crescent can't bid against each other, only the first bid will count (if I bid on auction X and Ferret want's to bid after me, she can't. But if Japanese_guy_1 bids after me, she can, unless I beat her to it).

After you have won an auction, all you have left to do is wait for a few days until Crescent contacts the seller, pays for the thing and the thing is shipped to Crescent. You'll see an option pay in the auction menu. The price consists of the items price, shipping to Crescent and Crescent's fee, which is 500YEN for items worth under 4,000YEN and 12,5% of the price for more expensive things. You should also be able to pay using your deposit money.

When the thing has arrived at Crescent (you'll see a notification arrived next to the auction) you can have your stuff shipped. You can choose from several shipping methods. You can also continue shopping for more stuff and let your stuff sent later, for smaller shipping fees. They'll keep your stuff for two months, maybe more if you ask them to. After you ask them to ship the stuff, there will be a few days of waiting, until the postage fee is calculated. They'll post the things after you have paid for shipping.

As for customs, they declare the price on the package, but they only include the auction price (they don't include Japanese-shipping or Crescent's fee).



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Text by a user in an Estonian anime forum, translation by me.

I have not used Crescent, or any other auction deputy services myself, although I intend to in the nearer future. This text is purely informational and I'm not responsible for your actions or anything...
« Last Edit: June 04, 2009, 10:07:32 AM by Hypno »

This is my administrator color.