Thread: Buying stuff from amazon.co.jp

Posts: 1

Post by zeus September 28, 2003 (1 of 1)
I recently added amazon.co.jp to the growing list of vendors linked to from this site. There's lots of SACDs that are only available in Japan, or from specialist importers at huge mark-up. These are sometimes referred to as "JSACDs". You may want to explore what's available.

For all you gaijin (foreigners, like me) I thought I'd give a few tips on working with amazon.co.jp as it looks pretty intimidating ... but it's really just amazon.com in Japanese. If you've bought from one amazon, you know them all!

When you select amazon.co.jp from the "Buy now from" selections, you'll get a pop-up window with the title listing on amazon.co.jp, generally all in Japanese. I've done a lot of work to check that the listing corresponds to that on this site but you may want to use Babel Fish (or similar) to check it out first. Generally there's no cover image or serial number so there's a slim chance you may end up with something different to what you expected. All care, no responsibility etc.

If you click on "Display in English", generally all that changes is the button texts. Click on "Add to Shopping Cart" and "Proceed to Checkout" as normal. Sometimes, when you're on the order pages, it drops out of English. You can fix this by clicking on the "Your Account" button above and then selecting "Set your ordering language preference". Hopefully from here it's all pretty straightforward. The hard work is finding the titles on amazon.co.jp and all this has been done for you.

An advantage of amazon.co.jp over hmv.co.jp is that the latter offers shipping only by Fedex which can be quite expensive. Click on "Help in English" for details on the shipping options supported by amazon.co.jp, together with pricing.

If anyone has any experiences dealing with amazon.co.jp maybe they can post them here.

Stephen

Closed