Japan Shopping Service Agency

Before you even start reading this page, please take a look at our facebook page http://www.facebook.com/BuyJapanese to see how our customers are saying about us.

What is Yahoo Japan Auctions

First of all, let’s start “What Yahoo Japan Auctions is”. Yahoo Japan Auctions is an auction service set up by the online search giant Yahoo! Japan. It’s basically same as eBay, but Yahoo Japan Auctions is by far the biggest auction service in Japan. As of December 2008, there were more than 20,000,000 items put at Yahoo Japan Auction. It is a collector’s heaven. There are tons of hard to find collectors items sold, so if you are looking for something special, it’s the place you go to look for.

Of course, the difference from eBay and challenging issue is the language. Yahoo Japan Auctions is designed for Japanese people, so everything is written in Japanese. Language is a huge hurdle when you don’t speak Japanese, but you’ve heard of Google Translate, have not you? It may not be the best solution to understand Japanese, still it helps you finding some information or details you are looking for. We picked up Google Translate as the example but you can use any translator you feel comfortable.

The other things you have to overcome using Yahoo Japan Auction is the layout which always gives trouble using unfamiliar sites. However don’t worry about it too much, once you start to use it. You will get use to it soon or later. Searching Yahoo Japan Auctions may seem the treasure hunting at first, but with our help you have better chance finding your treasure at Yahoo Japan Auctions than discovering gold in your backyard.

---

Some characteristics of Yahoo Japan Auctions you would like to know.

No. It’s not time to push a panic button yet. Yahoo Japan Auctions is just like any other auction sites you have used before. There are sellers selling products you want to purchase and there is you, a buyer, who are looking for something to buy. Whoever makes the highest bid will get chance to obtain the item. So, it’s not difficult isn’t it?

Now, let’s talk about real characteristics of Yahoo Japan Auctions. First of all, according to Yahoo Japan Auctions Guidelines “In order to be able to participate in Yahoo! Auctions, 1.you must be able to read, write, and fully understand Japanese; 2.you must be over 18 years old; 3. in addition to our Terms of Service (TOS), please read and agree to Yahoo! Auctions service guidelines below.
Notice: Yahoo! JAPAN currently provides customer service in Japanese only.” That’s encouraging! But don’t worry. We are older than 18 years old. We understand Japanese and live in Japan. We can help you.

Second, most sellers at Yahoo Japan Auctions don’t understand English and don’t ship to internationally. Chance of finding English speaking sellers who are willing to send your country is very slim. Shipping packages to oversea is not that difficult, if you know what you are doing. However there are numbers of things you have to pay attention such as postal delays, prohibited items and customs invoice forms, when you ship items outside of Japan. These are the things often local postal workers can’t answer our questions. Sellers at Yahoo Auction can be successful just dealing with Japanese buyers and make good money, so they don’t bother learning English and getting to know complicated international postal service.

OK. You speak Japanese, so the language is not the issue, you think? Unfortunately, probably the payment will stand on your way. PayPal is not very popular in Japan yet and Yahoo Japan Auctions does not accept payment by PayPal. Yahoo wallet, credit cards, bank transfer, COD(cash on delivery) are popular payment methods at Yahoo auctions. However you can’t use most foreign made (issued) credit cards at Yahoo Japan Auction, and the bank transfer from your county cost you a lot. Yahoo wallet is similar to PayPal. You can make a payment to a seller without revealing your personal information. In order to register Yahoo wallet, you must have an Japanese bank account or a credit card, but we told you that Yahoo Japan don’t accept most foreign made (issued) credit cards.

Another thing unique to Yahoo Japan Auctions is that you need to have a Yahoo ID to bid on the auction. It’s the Yahoo Japan ID, not the one you can register at other Yahoo sites. You can only get the Yahoo Japan ID at Yahoo Japan, which is not difficult to do. If you have the Yahoo Japan ID, you can bid item cost from 1 to 4,999yen at the auction. However if you want to bid the item cost higher than 5,000yen, you have to register as a Yahoo premium member, which cost you 346yen per month and require a credit card. Therefore, basically, you have to be in Japan to use Yahoo Auctions and we are glad to help you.

Another thing which makes difficult for you to bid at Yahoo Auction is the fact Yahoo Auction gives to much power to the sellers. The sellers can cancel your bid anytime before the auction ends without any penalty and many sellers do cancel your bid if you are a newbie and don’t have any reviews (feedback). They even say that in the description they will cancel the newbie’s bid.

About the sniping bid at Yahoo Japan Auctions, a lot of our customers ask us to place a bid last a few minutes before the auction ends. When a bidder or bidders place a new bid or bids to raise the price in less than 5 minutes before the auction ends, it will automatically extend 5 more minutes at Yahoo Auction. If other bidder place another bid, the auction will extend 5 more minutes again. It can go on and on until there is new bids.

---

Before you visit Yahoo Japan

Fist, you want to make sure your computer support Japanese font. If you use windows you should be able to use Japanese by following the steps.

control panel > regional/language options > install > add keyboard/language and done

Now, you can use Japanese on your computer and you know Google Translate, already. Another language help you may want to add is rikaichan, which is a popup Japanese-English/German/French/Russian dictionary tool for Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey. It’s really useful. If you install rikaichan, you don’t have to visit the translation site every time you want to translate. And learning basic Japanese always helps to use Japanese auction and shopping sites.
Translation tools are great and they do help you to understand, but they are far from perfect. Most people are looking for maniac hard to find items from auctions in Japan and sellers sometimes use technical terms, slang, which even Japanese have to google to figure out meaning, to describe their items. Translation tools are meaningless in that case. BUY JAPANESE is happy to help you to understand before you make an order. Asking is free. If you have any questions, feel free to ask us.

---

How to use Yahoo Japan Auctions

This is the top page of Yahoo Japan Auctions. As you can see it’s all Japanese, so let’s copy their URL http://auctions.yahoo.co.jp/ and go to google translate. Make sure you choose the language from “Japanese” to whatever language you want. We will translate it to English this time. Paste the URL and click the link.

Now, you will see the Yahoo page translated to English. If you know what you are looking for, then you can just type a key word(s) in the red rectangle in Japanese. Click search button. If you don’t know Japanese word(s) for the item you are looking for, you can search at Wikipedia. They often have Japanese words there. You can copy from there and paste it to Yahoo Auctions search box.

You may also search from categories on the right side, but clicking the link at categories will led you the page below. Don’t worry. Just click the link in the red rectangle. You will see translated page again.

Again this is the top page of Yahoo Japan Auctions. With using translator enter a keyword(s) in the search box, then click the button.

We searched “Hatsune Miku” (初音ミク) as an example. This was the search result.

1. It’s the image of the product.
2. The product name
3. Current high bid (in Japanese yen)
4. Buy it now price
Sometimes sellers list the “Buy it Now” price here. What you see below is how “Buy it Now” button and “Bid” button look like in the product description page.

It means current high bid is 21,000 yen and you can buy it now for 28,500yen.

5. Number of bids
6. time remaining

Another important information you can check from this search result is if the item is new or used.

If the item is new, you will see the sign.
If the item is used you will see this below.

You can see there are no “new” signs, which means they are used items.

Then we picked one item and this is the product page.

1. see the larger image(s)
2. product discription
3. current high bid
4. bid button
5. exact time remaining
6. bid history
7. seller’s information
8. feedback (Good seller’s have a lot of positive numbers. You should stay away from the seller with lots of negative feedback.)

This seller have 51 positive feedbacks and no negative ones.

9. questions to the seller
10. other products by this seller

You may also see the “New” sign on top of this page.

When you keep looking down the page, you will see this.

It’s the information about shipping.
1. Who will pay the shipping fee. Most cases buyers pay.
2. Where the item will be shipped. In this case, it will be shipped from Saitama prefecture.
3. International shipping. If the seller ships internationally you may not need our help.
4. Package information Length + width + height is less than 60cm and weight less than 2kg. You can estimate your international shipping fee from this information and our fee charts.

---

When you are bidding at Yahoo Japan Auctions
Automatic bidding system: All bids at Yahoo Japan Auctions are automatic bids. It means that when you placed your maximum bid, which other bidders don’t know your maximum bid. Yahoo Auction will place bids on your behalf using the automatic bid increment amount (please refer a table below for the amount of bid increments), which is based on the current high bid. Yahoo Auction will bid only as much as necessary to make sure that you remain the high bidder up to your maximum amount.

Yahoo Auction Bid Increments :
The incremental amount is predetermined based on the current highest bid on the item.
The following table shows the amount of bid increments.

Current highest bid	Bid Increment
1yen to 999yen	10yen
1,000yen to 4,999yen	100yen
5,000yen to 9,999yen	250yen
10,000yen to 49,999yen	500yen
Over 50,000yen	1,000yen

We hope this helps you to find your treasure at Yahoo Japan Auctions. If you already found the item you like, you may learn about our Yahoo Japan Auctions bidding service and ask for us to bid .

If you find an item you would like to purchase on a Japanese shopping site instead of auction sites, you can obtain it through our Shopping Service.