How it works
Yahoo Auctions Japan is where the parts are — and it will not sell to you, take your card, or ship to your door. We do those three things, then put your part in a container with everybody else’s so the freight costs a fraction of what a single box would.
1. Find the part
Search in English. We translate the listing, the title and the seller’s name — Japanese sellers write in Japanese, and a part described as “used, some scratches” is worth knowing about before you bid, not after.
Already have a listing open? Paste the link or the auction number into search and it will take you straight there. If it isn’t on Yahoo at all, ask us to source it — new from a manufacturer, OEM, or a used find on another marketplace.
2. Bid, or buy outright
Set your maximum and we bid for you, in yen, on the Japanese side. Roughly half of Yahoo’s listings are fixed-price, and those you can simply buy.
A bid holds your money. It does not take it. Nothing is charged until you actually win. If you are outbid, or the auction ends without you, the hold is released and that is the end of it.
Buying outright is the exception, and for the obvious reason: a fixed-price purchase cannot lose, so there is no win to wait for and it charges at once.
Before you commit you will see the whole first charge — item price, Japanese consumption tax, our platform fee, import tariff and the seller’s domestic shipping inside Japan — with the ocean freight shown as an estimated range. Every fee is written down.
3. We win it and pay the seller
When you win, we pay the seller in Japan and have the part sent to our warehouse there. Japanese sellers deal with Japanese buyers, in Japanese, with a Japanese payment method and a Japanese address — that whole side of the transaction is ours.
4. It ships in a shared container
Your part waits at our warehouse for the next sailing, then crosses in a container shared with other customers’ parts. That sharing is the entire point: a bumper or a set of wheels sent alone by air or courier can cost more than the part did.
Each container has a cut-off date, a departure and an arrival, and you can see them before you bid — so “when will it get here” is a date you check rather than a question you ask.
5. The second payment, then collection
Ocean freight is the second charge, and it is billed once your part has been received and measured, because a box’s real size is the thing that determines it. The estimate you saw when bidding is a range taken from parts we have actually shipped.
The top of that range is a cap, not a guess. If your part measures larger than the high end of the estimate, we absorb the difference. It happens on roughly one item in ten, and it is our problem rather than yours.
When the container lands you collect from the pickup point you chose — each one shows its address, opening details and anything you need to bring. Some locations are delivery routes rather than places to turn up, and those ask for your street address instead.
What we do not do
We do not inspect parts before bidding, and we cannot make a seller describe one honestly. Read the listing and look at the photographs; the translation is there to help you do exactly that. If something arrives not as described, tell us — but the honest position is that a used part bought at auction carries the risk a used part bought at auction carries.
Still deciding?
The FAQ answers the questions we get most, and writing to us is free. Browsing and searching need no account at all — you only sign up when you want to bid.