After years of gradual improvements, eBay has become a very reliable marketplace for buyers of second hand cameras and lenses. It’s been years since I’ve had an even moderately unpleasant experience with eBay.

But eBay is expensive – for the seller (the 13.6% eBay commission is calculated on the total cost of your purchase, shipping and taxes included – which brings it closer to 16% of the value of the sale for seller, in most cases), and as a consequence, for the buyer – because the sellers have to recoup their costs one way or another.

Until last year, a very good option to save money while remaining on eBay was to buy second hand photo equipment from stores located in Japan – the equipment was in very good shape, cheaper than in the US, and could be delivered on your doorsteps in two days – faster than if it had been shipped from the US territory by an American seller. I’ve done it often and never had any problem.

Unfortunately, the introduction of higher tariffs, the suppression of the de minimus exemption (purchases below $800.00 could previously enter the country duty-free), and the suspension of the two day delivery service to the US by the Japanese Post have completely changed the landscape, and buying from Japanese eBay stores has become seriously expensive. To the announced purchase price, you have to add the tariffs themselves, the fees collected by the customs agents (there and here), and the cost of shipping by a premium US carrier.

There does not seem to be a unique answer to those changes for the Japanese stores present on eBay – a few of them advertise an all-inclusive but higher selling price, while the majority keep the price of the item reasonable, but add massive shipping fees to cover the cost of new constraints – sometimes in the hundreds of dollars.

Japanese sellers still keep a big advantage over their American counterparts – a much wider inventory of “interesting” cameras. The Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) often gets the exclusivity of limited series or of specific camera body colors – and some brands with little traction in the US (like Pentax) are also better represented in their home market.

But not all Japanase vendors work with eBay. They can still be reached, and you can tap the seemingly unlimited inventory of the JDM, with the help of Buyee.jp, a proxy buying service.

What is a proxy buying service?

Unless you can read and somehow write Japanese (I don’t), it’s next to impossible to conduct a business transaction directly with a Japanese store. And assuming you do, how are you going to convince a little store in Kyoto or Osaka to go out of their way, take care of all the customs induced hassle, and ship the item you purchased to your end of the world? That’s where Buyee.jp can help:

• they operate an English language Web site and offer an English language smartphone app that will let you browse multiple Japanese marketplaces – the search bar is accepting requests written in the latin alphabet, and the responses (in Japanese) are embedded in a Google Translate window, making it relatively easy to understand what’s being offered.
• If you decide to purchase a product (or are the successful bidder in an auction), they will take care of completing the transaction on your behalf (you pay Buyee through PayPal), and will start the process of bringing the purchase to your door step: the seller has to ship the product to a local Buyee warehouse, Buyee takes care of packaging (if necessary), of customs and shipping.
• Two weeks later, you finally receive the purchased item.

The item description is translated by Google. This Fujifilm Klasse is not as nice as hoped

Testing the Buyee service

I sold my Pentax K-5 II a few months ago, to fund the purchase of another camera, but I liked my K-5, and after a while I started feeling some sort of seller’s remorse. I started looking for the next step up in the K-5 family, the K-5 IIs, on eBay, and on Buyee.jp.

That week, there were were three K-5 IIs on the eBay US store, 1 located in the US, 2 located in Japan, with prices (incl. custom duties and shipping) ranging between $300 and $400.

On the Buyee app, I visited the JDirectItems Auction marketplace. There were 13 items for sale, all based in Japan, of course – and priced in Yen. The Buyee app does the conversion in US dollars automatically, which brought their K-5 IIs inside a range starting at $186 and topping at $410, customs duties and shipping not included.

I picked a model rated as “AB-” (the seller was describing it as “a little dirty” and was disclosing that the rear LCD was yellowing). Japanese sellers are generally very conservative in their assessments: judge for yourself from the pictures I took just after receiving the camera.

I placed my bid at $208.00, and won. I had Buyee coupons to redeem (they seem to be very generous with their coupon allocation), and only had to pay $180 for the camera, through PayPal.

The timeline

6/14 – I paid for the item (to Buyee, with Paypal).

6/17 – Item arrived at Buyee.jp warehouse

6/17 – The buyer (me) was informed he had to go in the Buyee app and configure the shipping and packaging options.

• There was only one option for shipping to the US: Fedex.

6/20 – After evaluating the packaging of the seller, Buyee decided that there was no need for extra packaging.

I confirmed that everything was OK for me, and Buyee established an invoice for its services: shipment, fees and tariffs and taxes, for a total of $72.00 to be paid through a second PayPal transaction. Which I did the same day.

6/23 – Fedex received the package

6/26 – The Item was delivered to my doorstep

The financials

All in all, I paid $252.00 for this K-5IIs – I suspect a model in an equivalent condition would have cost me at least $300.00 on eBay (assuming I could find one) – so, there’s a net savings of at least $50 on a $250 purchase. That’s significant.

One of the limitations of the Buyee.jp process is that you don’t know the exact amount of the shipping fees and customs duties you will have to pay at the time when you place your bid. You know the exact amount one week after the purchase, when Buyee has received the equipment from the local vendor and worked with their customs agents.

In the case of this camera, the various shipping, handling and administrative fees did amount to $53 – I assume that they’re not proportional to the value of the item, but mainly to its weight. And that they should be more or less the same if I buy another camera or a lens in the future.

US Customs duties are more difficult to predict – and they’re subject to some political uncertainty – but as of June 2026: the exact amount depends on:

• the country of origin of the equipment (the country where the final assembly took place, even if you buy from a Japanese store), and on
• the exact classification of the equipment in the tables of the US Customs (I believe cameras are under code 9006.530.205).

This camera was made in the Philippines (Pentax assemble their cameras in Vietnam or in the Philippines), and according to the tables of the US Customs, should encur a 10 % tariff (which corresponds more or less to what I paid to Buyee).

More on the subject at:

https://tariffs.flexport.com/?htsCode=9006530205&name=with-through-the-lens-viewfinder

Let’s recap: the cost of the camera with Buyee:

• Auction price and Buyee “plan fee” : $180
• Shipping, handling, and customs agent fees: $53.15
• US Tariffs: 18.85
• Total: $252

As a conclusion

Buyee.jp gives you access to a much wider inventory of equipment, and at prices that can be very significantly lower than on eBay (or at KEH or MPB)

The app – without being stellar – does the job – what needs to be translated is translated, the necessary explanations are provided, and the complexity of the whole transaction is masked to a large extend.

Buyee is also more transparent than most of the Japanese eBay sellers – you get a detailed invoice itemizing the cost of each service provided and you don’t get the impression of being taken advantage of with arbitrary and exorbitant shipping fees as can be the case with eBay.

On the minus side, the whole process is slow (for me, 12 days between the purchase and the delivery), and you don’t know before far too late (when the seller has already shipped the item to the Buyee warehouse) how much you’re going to pay for shipping and for clearing the customs.

My seller proved reliable and shipped a camera in a better state that advertised, but I don’t know how issues with a defective item would be solved (I did not read Buyee’s fine print, to be honest).

So, if you’re in a hurry and don’t want to have to think too much about the process, buy from an eBay store. If you can’t find what you want on eBay or if you’re looking for the absolute best bargain – try Buyee. But you’ll have to pay attention to their notifications and confirm packaging and shipment details a few days after the sale, or your purchase will stay in limbo in Buyee’s warehouse. And you’ll have to be patient – you won’t get the item you purchased in less than 10 days, at best.

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More about film, film cameras and old gear in general in CamerAgX.com:

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