term of service

Terms of Agreement

Mail Order Japan’s Yahoo Japan Auctions service is a service that we provide to non-Japanese due to their inability to deal with Japanese sellers directly. Mail Order Japan has no financial or legal relationship whatsoever with Yahoo Japan Auctions or the sellers who put their items on auction for sale.

When you ask Mail Order Japan to bid on Yahoo Japan Auctions, you explicitly and implicitly agree to the terms and condition set by Mail Order Japan for completing the transaction process for various auctions on client’s behalf. If you have any questions regarding our terms and conditions, please do not hesitate to send us your questions

DEPOSITS

We require all customers to make a deposit to be allowed to bid with Mail Order Japan. The amount of the deposit is up to the customer. Generally, you will be allowed to bid 2 times the amount deposited. For example, you can deposit $250 to bid up to $500. If you are a regular bidder, it’s always desirable to maintain a deposit with Mail Order Japan for your Yahoo Japan Auctions bidding. Minimum deposit we require is $20 or equivalent in other currencies. Any deposits less than $20 will be refunded.

Deposits will be kept on hand only used for your bids. As you keep bidding and winning, we will keep using your deposits. If you run out, you will be required for more deposit. No deposit on hand means the system will deny you to place any bids.

If you place a bid, we pay for it to your sellers within 24 hours. Please make sure you fully understand the final cost of an item. If you don’t pay for an auction item you won, your deposit will be kept and not returned. The deposit will partially cover the cost incurred in purchasing the item for you.

We do not deduct any service charges if you do not win any items on Yahoo Japan Auctions. We will refund your deposit back to you 100%. We can refund your deposit to you within 1-3 business days after we receive the request for refund. If you make a request after friday afternoon, your request make take longer than our standard 1-3 business days refund policy

BIDDING POLICY

Customers are responsible for their bids. Once you place a bid, you are responsible for it 100%. No bids can be reversed. You are legally and morally bound to meet your commitments. Please make sure you fully understand each bid. Japanese language knowledge is not an excuse. Do not make your bidding decisions based only on the pictures. If you see 20 video games in a picture, make sure the seller is not saying to choose only one video game of the 20. Similarly, a seller may have a picture for 4 wheels but he would be saying clearly that the bid is for one wheel only. If you want more wheels, you will be paying more. This is one of the techniques used by sellers in Japan to reduce their fees they pay to Yahoo Japan. Its important that you fully understand whats up for bid.

We are not the sellers of the items. We act as agents for receiving your items from sellers and then shipping them to you. We do not check the items whether they are according to their description or not. If you intend to place bids on expensive items, we can check them for you but you must submit a written request for that. We may or may not charge a fee for the checkup. If the items checkup requires more labor, there will be fee.

If you receive an item completely different from what you have seen in the picture, we will be happy to contact the seller for you without any fee either for return or replacement. Usually, the seller will pay for the local shipping from us to the seller since it would be his mistake. However, MOJ customers must pay for the shipping costs from them to MOJ office. MOJ will not be responsible for any costs under any circumstances.

FRAUD POLICY

MOJ acts an agent of shipping your items from your sellers to you. MOJ doesnt sell any of the items that you receive from Yahoo Japan Auctions or any other websites. If you bid on item and the seller doesnt ship it in the first place, MOJ will not be responsible for that. Customers take full responsibility for their bids. Please make sure you check the feedback of the sellers carefully before you place a bid on their items. Like on ebay, each seller gets feedback. You will see a number figure in front of the seller ID. That shows the number of feedback the seller. You will see feedback for 1 week, 4 weeks and 24 weeks. The feedback in Red in the third row will shows the bad sales. Please make sure you carefully look at those figures. If a seller has many RED feedbacks, its a red flag and its better to avoid. If you really want the item, talk to us and we will do a more careful check on the seller for you.

Combining shipping of multiple auctions

If you are our regular customer and if you bid on multiple items at the same time, we will combine your items and send them to you in a single shipment to save you on the shipping cost. For larger items , we have handling charges. Please check out our shipping and fees sections for more details on handling charges. 

Insurance

We do not provide any kind of insurance for any Yahoo Japan Auctions items we receive. We function as an intermediary between you and the Yahoo Japan Auction sellers. However, the shipping companies here do cover the shipping and provide limited insurance. Only EMS covers international shipping. Sometimes, we will arrange surface shipping for our customers. We usually do not charge any extra for that. However, if the customer requests insurance for surface mail, we will have to discuss this individually with each customer. 

Yen Exchange Rate Policy

We accept payments in all currencies. We use paypal exchange rate of the day for US Dollars. For example, if you deposit $100 with mailorderjapan with a paypal exchange rate for that day is 112, you will see 12,000 yen in your account. We always round off the exchange rate to the lower whole number. Whether the paypal exchange rate for the day is 112.01 yen or 112.99, we would still be using 112 yen. We do this to protect ourselves against the exchange rate movements. For all other currencies, we use paypal exchange rate of the day minus one yen. We do not encourage payments in JPY. If the payment is made directly in JPY, there will be a currency conversion charge of 1%. We do this to make sure all depositors get the same value for their deposits

Please do not make deposits based on the open market exchange rates. Those rates are bank to bank exchange rates. We use the actual paypal exchange rate. The paypal exchange rate is usually 2.5% to 4% different from the open market exchange rate, depending on the time of the day you visit the open market rate. If you would like to know the paypal exchange rate, please log in to your paypal account and just type currency exchange rate in the help section of paypal. You will get all the relevant info. 

The currency exchange rate is subject to a constant change and it's beyond anyone’s control. It never remains the same. You may see more than 2 yen movement in a single day sometimes. During US sub prime mortgate crisis in August/September 2007 , the exhange rate for US $ moved massively from 124 yen per 1 USD to 111 yen per USD in less than a week time. If the market is volatile like this and if there is a massive move in the foreign exchange market, we will adjust our currency rate accordingly. The exchange rate is open to adjustment till we ship your items to you.

If you have any questions regarding currency exchange rates, please talk to us.