People often use shopping services to buy from sites like Taobao, a Chinese shopping site similar to Ebay. A shopping service is simply a company which will order what you want to buy from a website or shop oversees that doesn't ship internationally, and for a percentage fee will ship it to you. I wanted a limited edition Rikka Takanashi Azone doll which was only sold on TBS Shop, a Japanese site, so I needed to find a Japanese shopping service to order it. I could find lots of information on services which enable you to buy from China (mainly for Taobao) but I couldn't find much on Japanese ones. I'm hoping to share some useful information for anyone in my situation in the future ^^
She isn't available on the TBS shop any more, but you may be able to find one on Ebay
After a bit of searching online I decided to go with a service called Noppin. They seemed good, they didn't need to ask for any authorising payments before I could order (which was the case with another service I was going to try, I forget the name, but payments like that just seem fishy to me;; ) I sent them a message with the link to the doll I wanted to pre-order, and they were fairly quick to reply. They ordered the doll, and billed me the price, which I paid through Paypal. Then came the long wait until the doll was released in October (I ordered in April)
My message to Noppin, click the picture if you can't read it ^^
The price of the doll was 12,960 yen (£70) and Noppin's service charge was 2296 yen (£12) which didn't seem too bad to me, considering the charge is taken as a percentage of the cost of your order, meaning a cheaper order would be charged less. Altogether with 533 yen payment handling the total cost before shipping the doll to me was 15,789 yen (£85) Considering many of the dolls on Ebay now are around £120+ I was making a decent saving.
Once the doll was received by Noppin, they emailed me to let me know they had it in storage. I then had to request they calculate the shipping cost (presumably in case you were ordering from a few different places, so you could ship everything at once) which they priced at 2400 yen (£13) which I paid over Paypal. They then shipped out my doll by courier, and after a couple of weeks I received a rather painful customs charge from the UK borders agency *shakes fist*
That's no fault of Noppin of cource, that's just the worst thing about living in the UK and enjoying to buy things from oversees :'( With all the costs and charges added together it came to about £120, which isn't that much of a saving compared to buying the doll on ebay, but you have to remember shipping costs and customs charges by ordering from ebay, so I still made a saving by ordering direct from Japan.
After a hiccup with Parcelforce, my doll finally arrived, 3 weeks after Noppin shipped it. That's pretty much general shipping times when buying from Japan, which is good ^^
The box was well packed and protected, so there was no worries about my doll breaking or her box getting damaged c:
And she is here! I'm not going to do a doll review (but let me know if you'd like a separate post on that!) but I'm pretty happy with her!
Overall my experience with using Noppin has been good, I had initially been nervous about using a shopping service to order from Japan, but I feel more confident using a service like this and I will definitely do it again in the future! And I will most likely use Noppin again too, as they were good and I received my item with no problems, even after a 6 month wait after pre-ordering.
Rikka agrees, the ordering process has been good!
I hope this post has been helpful for anyone thinking about ordering from Japan, if you have any questions be sure to leave a comment and I will try to help you :3
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