Using the Buyee Shopping Service to Get Wrestling Cards from Japan

I finally took the plunge and used a buying service to pick up some Japanese wrestling cards from Amazon.co.jp and Yahoo! Auctions. The service I used is called Buyee. They have a browser add-on that allows you to use Amazon.co.jp to add items to your Buyee cart, and their site has a direct link to Yahoo! Auctions that allows you to search, make purchases, place bids, and place snipe bids directly form the auction listings. They have partnerships with other sites, too, like Rakuten and ZOZO. The one seller I use on Rakuten ships directly to the US, though, so I can't see myself using them for that.

I purchased five cards through Yahoo! Auctions and one card set from an Amazon seller. I'll show off the single cards first, and then I'll go into a breakdown of how using Buyee went for me.

I was able to add three autographed BBM True Heart wrestling cards to my Command Bolshoi autograph timeline. First up is the card from 2005. I showed off the 2005 base set just a couple of days ago. This autograph is numbered # 60 / 89.

Here is Command Bolshoi's 2006 BBM True Heart autograph. Her 2012 card also pictures her with a guitar, and many of her Facebook posts show her and some friends on a stage with instruments. I assume they have some kind of band. This one is numbered # 62 / 99.

The last Command Bolshoi autograph I got was the 2007 version. This photo is a little more standard than her usual fare; it's just a posed outdoor shot. This autograph is numbered # 064 / 100. These three cards filled a nice gap in my Command Bolshoi collection. I think the only True Heart autograph I am missing from her now is 2004. I am not certain that a 2004 autograph exists, though. It is likely, but 2004 cards in general just don't show up ever.

I also picked up a couple of Rabbit Miu autographs that I didn't have yet. I haven't made a concerted effort to build her autograph timeline like I have for Command Bolshoi, but I'd be willing to bet that I've got most of her autographs. This is her 2012 autograph. It's numbered # 013 / 100.

I also jumped ahead a few years and got the 2015 version of her autograph. This one is numbered # 61 / 90. I think the sets with wrestlers pictured in regular clothes predate her wrestling debut in 2011, so she only has cards with posed shots in ring gear.

Hopefully you can click the image to enlarge it.

Now that I've showed all of the single cards I bought, I wanted to go into some detail about my experience using Buyee to get these cards. Buyee acts as a middleman for transactions with Japanese merchants. They take care of payment and domestic shipping, and they then forward your packages to you. All of these actions have one or more fees associated with them. So many fees, and I didn't even use all of the services.

For the 2003 BBM True Heart set, I made the purchase from an Amazon Japan seller. Buyee has a browser extension that you can download. When you find an item you want, you click the button to add it to your Buyee cart, which takes you to the Buyee page where you can add special instructions and adjust the quantity you want to purchase. Once the details are all good you click the button to make the purchase. In addition to the price of the item, you also pay a 150 JPY service fee. The yen tracks pretty close to the dollar, so you can roughly read 150 JPY as $1.50. The other fees come later. So making the purchase costs the item price plus the Service Fee. There are additional services you can pay for, like having Buyee inspect your items for damage and correctness upon arrival in the warehouse. I declined these services.

For the Yahoo! Auctions, Buyee is integrated into the auction listings. You can do a number of things, such as Buy It Now, bidding, and snipe bidding. For Buy It Now listings you pay right away, and I think for bids the money gets moved when the auction completes. In addition to the 150 JPY service fee, there is a 200 JPY payment fee that I guess covers the cost of making the payment to the seller and arranging shipment. So just for that you tack on an additional 350 JPY to each auction you win. 

Once you make all of your purchases, you wait for the packages to arrive at the warehouse. This is where the domestic shipping fee comes in. You are paying for the shipping from the seller to the Buyee warehouse. You don't pay this cost until you pay the international shipping fee at the very end. But it's there, and just like with your standard eBay or Amazon sellers, the shipping cost can vary. I paid between 194 JPY and 390 JPY each for shipping on these six items. My totals so far are 4,430 JPY for the base purchase price, 900 JPY for service fees, 1000 JPY for Yahoo! Auction payment fees, and 1,546 JPY for domestic shipping.

Once the items hit the warehouse, you have thirty days to request shipment or you start incurring storage fees. This gives you a decent window to gather items together because consolidation of packages is a big cost saver. You want to wait until all of your packages are in the warehouse before you consolidate, because each time you consolidate it costs more. You can choose not to consolidate, but then you will pay international shipping on each package, and you don't want to do that. For only two items, you can consolidate them for 500 JPY. For three or more, it is a flat 1000 JPY fee. But if you combine two items at 500 JPY and then want to add another item to the package, it will cost an additional 1000 JPY. And then an additional 1000 JPY each additional time you consolidate. I waited until all six packages were in the warehouse and consolidated them all at once for 1000 JPY. I divided it evenly between them in the chart. There are additional services that you can purchase, like protective packaging. I declined them.

Once your package is consolidated, you choose among the international shipping options that are made available based on the weight and size of your package. For my package there were around 8 different shipping services with different delivery speeds. I again went with the cheapest option at 1,190 JPY. There were options all the way up to around 4,000 JPY, if I recall correctly. Once you click that final button, the domestic shipping, consolidation, and international shipping fees all get charged to you and the package gets prepped and shipped out. In my case, all of the packages (PWEs for the single cards and a padded mailer for the set) were placed in bubble wrap and then placed together in a shipping bag. My wife had an appointment on the day the package was scheduled to arrive, so I took some leave from work to stay home and sign for it. Most of my packages from Japan require a signature, so I was expecting this.

In the end, fees and shipping charges wound up increasing the price I paid on my items by more than double. I still feel like I got a pretty reasonable deal overall, but it's tough to see a $45 purchase balloon up over $100 after fees are added. This isn't a service I would use often or casually, but I could see myself doing something like this once a year when I see a few really desirable items pop up. I might have skipped the Rabbit Miu autographs if I had anticipated how much the fees would really cost me, but in the end I am happy to have them in my collection. The price could have been even higher if I had used some of the other services that Buyee offers, like inspection and protective packaging. Overall I did get pretty fair prices for items I couldn't find in the United States, and didn't really vastly overpay on the transaction as a whole. The Buyee site was a little hard to follow, but in aggregate the FAQ pages gave me a pretty good awareness of the fees beforehand, although I don't know if they really sunk in until I made my little chart.

2005 BBM True Heart Women's Pro Wrestling

I hadn't filled any holes in my BBM True Heart set collection for a while, as some of the sets just don't show up very often. I get most of my sets from the same eBay seller in Japan, so I am limited to whatever they have in stock at any given time.

As far as I know, BBM's sets for women's wrestling were branded as Fighting Beauties for 2000, 2001, and 2002. I have the 2001 set, but not the others. In 2003 they transitioned to the True Heart name, which has come out annually since. With today's pick-up of the 2005 base set, I am still missing 2003, 2004, and 2009 for the True Heart cards. I do have 2003 on order, though, so it should be in my hands soon. I'm like 80% sure that I have the 2007 set, but I don't have scans in my folder or a post on my blog about it. I'll have to dig through my boxes and see what's going on with that. So I still need:

2000 BBM Fighting Beauties

2002 BBM Fighting Beauties

2004 BBM True Heart

2009 BBM True Heart

Based on my limited research, it looks like the women just got subsets in BBM's other offerings prior to the year 2000. I've got a handful of those cards from 1997 and 1998, and I've seen some of the others listed online.

The 2005 BBM True Heart set has 108 cards in the checklist. The first 93 cards are the standard wrestler cards. The wrestlers are grouped by promotion, with the organization's logo on the front and color-coding on the back. In the earlier years of these sets, the card fronts showed the wrestlers in street clothes with wrestling action shots on the back. More recently, the cards have retained the wrestling action shots on the card backs, but they feature posed photos on the front with the wrestlers in their ring gear.

The lower left on the card front has the BBM 15th Anniversary logo, and the logo for the promotion the wrestler is affiliated with. The lower right has the wrestler's anglicized name, the name of the set, and in tiny little text it also lists the promotions included in the checklist: All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling, JWP, LLPW, JD Star, NEO, A to Z, M's Style, GATO-ku-nyan, IWA Japan, DDT, NIGHT-MARE KAIENTAI DOJO, Shinma Office, and Free Lance wrestlers at the end of the set.

Azumi Hyuga's card also shows a cat who wasn't too interested in having its picture taken. The move to featuring wrestlers in their ring gear has eliminated some of these fun photos, like Command Bolshoi on a unicycle or wrestlers with their pets.

The card backs feature a wrestling action photo, a biographical paragraph, and some of the usual data like height, weight, blood type, birth date, debut date, and a few other things I'm not sure about. Also up at the top you can find the card number, the wrestler's name in kanji characters, and the wrestling promotion's name. Again, I tried to pick some of the more interesting pictures for these scans.

Kana is the big name in this set of scans. She is currently taking the WWE's NXT developmental division by storm, with rumors that she might soon jump up to the main WWE roster. I just thought the other photos were cool, with a phone, a horned mask, and a compact car all making guest appearances.

I thought the Rei (Ray) photo was interesting because it shows her wearing a mask differing from the style I am familiar with. The other cards were chosen for their photographs. I have some miniature blind-pack figurines that I need to show off one of these days. Ofune is one of the wrestlers in that set.

Here are a few freelance wrestlers. Jaguar Yakota, Dump Matsumoto, and Ayako Hamada are all pretty famous, and all are still actively wrestling. Sumie Sakai lives and wrestles in the US now, mostly with the Ring of Honor/Women of Honor promotion. She also tried MMA for a while, and I am not sure if she is still pursuing that. Her debut MMA bout in 2006 was in my neck of the woods at a show in Boise, Idaho.

Cards 94-99 on the checklist make up a Ladies on Film subset, which feature a few fashion-shoot styled photos and a little box on the back with some of the wrestler's characteristics in English. Cards 100-102 are the cards for wrestlers who retired in 2004. Usually the wrestlers will get a final show from their promotion, with plenty of gifts and a whole lot of streamers. The photos on these cards appear to be from those retirement shows. Finally, cards 103-108 make up a Precious Memories subset. I'm sure that I would have a better idea about what this set means if I could read the card backs. All of the wrestlers in this subset retired in 2003 or earlier, and this might be a, "Where are they now?" kind of thing.

That's my quick overview of the 2005 BBM True Heart Japanese Women's Pro Wrestling set. I am hoping to have the 2003 set pretty soon. I will have another post to go along with that one, as it marked the first time I used a buying service to purchase products from Amazon.jp and Yahoo! Auctions in Japan.