Who owns Shiina stuff?

[Ringo~Bingo]

Use a deputy service! such as Shopping Mall Japan. If you intend to bid on something just be sure to read about the costs/commissions etc.

[shiinafile]

Originally Posted by Ringo~Bingo

Use a deputy service! such as Shopping Mall Japan. If you intend to bid on something just be sure to read about the costs/commissions etc.

Awesome, you ROCK! My debt consolidator will thank you

[Ringo~Bingo]

A couple of things turned up today after I paid the Customs/ransom

Just the three items but they are decent enough I got my long coveted Shiina Ringo old school autograph from back in the day! it was a competition prize so it came with a little photocopy of the competition article from a magazine which is nice as it gives it a little bit of provenance.

Secondly I got a hard case from the EM tour (?) which comes in a great little bag and has an art sheet inside and a little apple phone charm that has little movable dice inside

Thirdly I got another of my much loved cardboard promos! this one being for Mayonaka, this along with my ZCS promo differ from the later ones as they are giant whereas all the later ones I have (or have seen) tend to be nearer A4 in size o_O

This is probably the last shipment I'll take this side of the year so I'm pretty pleased with them!

I know the keychain/dice shot is crap but that's the best I could do

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[shiinafile]

That's some really cool stuff. I really dig the autograph. Did you ever see the website for EM where you walked around the village?
I was able to curtail my temptation to the auctions for the moment but I really appreciate your help.

[Ringo~Bingo]

Nah I never saw that site? I only started following Shiina online from early 2006 so it may have been taken down before I saw it (or I just missed it).

If you do get on the auctions I can only say to be careful it's very very addcitive and you can sometimes forget that you have to pay afterwards I went on recently to check my invoices and ended up buying a ZCS Score Book and a Muzai Moratorium poster! that's 13.000 Yen that I haven't even factored into any kind of budget (I'm already in debt!) just be careful not to get carried away!

Luckily I've made a little on eBay recently with some games to help towards the cost!

[makenshiww]

Bingo that keychain. <3

[darkdisco]

I think this is the most appropriate place to ask, so . . .

If I wanted to order something from the Kronekodow shop, I'd go through a service like Shopping Mall Japan, right? I worked through part of the site using a translator, so I figured out that they don't ship abroad. But how do I know what the items cost? You click the picture and it only gives you information about it, and I'd assume that it would tell you the cost if you added it to the shopping cart, but I can't actually find the shopping cart itself.

[Glathannus]

darkdisco,

After you get out of the "display purposes only" trap (I've been at that very same dead end before), there are other problems:

Even when you are at the true site where you are supposed to be, the individual items do not get their own separate pages for cart-adding purposes. All of the cart buttons for all of the items, are on ONE big page - very similar to the cartless page you've seen already. SMJ (and any other company offering similar services) hardly wants to get involved with an online shop like Kronekodow's when too little or too much information from you could lead to confusion and result in the purchase of the wrong item(s).

If you want a proxy-buying service to cooperate with your Kronekodow request, you will probably need to take screenshots of the page(s) and throw in your own MSPaint notes and scribbles. This was how I succeeded when I had placed a Special Order at Kronekodow for Ringo~Bingo and myself (we were pooling our money together into one SMJ transaction to save on commissions), and that was when the currency exchange rates weren't quite as terrible as they are today. My first Special Order attempt failed without the visual aids, even though I provided plenty of information and thought I had articulated it fairly clearly. I also didn't make any contextually-oblivious mistakes with what my screenshots did or didn't include - I had to think as if I were an SMJ employee who didn't necessarily know much Japanese, and as if they were someone who knew absolutely nothing about the Kronekodow store and didn't want to expend any brainpower to figure out anything on their own about the site. If you aren't clear and unquestionable enough about what precisely you want from Kronekodow, SMJ may just blow you off and charge you $5 for wasting their time.

SMJ also has a certain minimum fee they charge per Special Order, and just like with auctions; the more goods you can secure in one transaction - the lower in percentage the SMJ fees will be in relation to the base transaction. This means if there's anything else at Kronekodow that you think you might try and buy sometime in 2010 - it's best you wait until you have the money for everything you want, so that you'll get charged a lot less fees.

I should also point out that the US dollar is now the weakest it has ever been against the Japanese yen throughout the past 14 years, and SMJ charges you their own exchange rate which is even more brutal than that. By the time you've gone through every phase of the transaction, you'll feel as if Zimbabwe has the world's only currency which could possibly be doing worse right now.

Are you sure that you're ready to deal with all of that?
I'm not going to call your fandom into question if you happen to decide that perhaps now isn't the best time to be using a proxy-buying service for Japan. I don't mean to be condescending or elitist - I'm just not eager to tell you the minimum of what you want to know, only to have the transaction cost you so much more money than you already thought it would cost in the end. Do NOT underestimate the exchange rates or the international shipping costs.

Now if you're wondering why I haven't linked to the "true site", that's because it would be better if I took screenshots and showed you how I got there from Kronekodow's main site - so you would have the assurance I'm not leading you to a scam site (it doesn't matter who I am or how many people trust me - you should be acting upon nothing less than verifiable information). I'm not ready to come up with those screenshots at this hour of the night. Check back in a day or two.

[darkdisco]

Originally Posted by Glathannus

I don't mean to be condescending or elitist

You're not, don't worry. And that was a really helpful post, especially since I basically have no idea what I'm doing. I mean, I didn't even know there was an official shop until recently. So thanks.

But anyhow, by clicking around I did end up on the ordering page, only to find that what I wanted to order is sold out, although on the display site, the items weren't marked as such. Oh well.

[Glathannus]

You might notice that the Add To Cart buttons are non-javascript links - they have their own full URLs you can copy to the clipboard, and paste elsewhere. So in theory it should be possible to send those cart-adding URLs to SMJ as if those URLs were product pages - but when I tried that, SMJ didn't like it and they didn't even tell me why they didn't like it. So if you decide to use SMJ, there is hardly any avoiding of the screenshots with the scribbled notes on them.