We are still early in development on kuboTEN, and we need our customer’s feedback!  Help shape kuboTEN and make it an even better user experience.

What features or changes would you like to see at kuboTEN?

More kuboCATEGORIES?
More frequent kuboBLURB blog posts?
Cheaper rates?

We can’t promise we’ll be able to implement everything suggested, but it will be put into our super secret fire-proof safe and may come up sometime in the future!

Hello KuboCRAIG,

Having just placed my first bid using your site (hope I win!), I have one idea that would be for convenience rather than a necessity.  Under the “Pending Bids & Orders” page it would be helpful if it contained a link to the auction so you could click and view directly (with translation) without a search.

Thanks for the great site and wish me luck on my first auction!

Best regards,
Alex

Thank you very much for the bid and for the suggestion!  I was sorry to see that you got outbid.  (;_;)

On the bright side, we have implemented your suggestion, so you can now click on the auction ID in your bids & orders page and it will bring you to the translated auction page. 

hi
could it be possible to save items too? to track them. even though you havent bidded on them.(e.g to find out how much things go for). for future reference..
thanks…

Hi there,

That’s an excellent suggestion, and a feature that we will try to include in our upcoming watchlist feature!  We’ll make sure that the watchlist allows you to view completed auctions, since it is an unfortunate fact that Yahoo Auctions has no “search completed auctions” feature the way that eBay does.

In the meantime, one temporary way to track auctions would be to bookmark the pages by right-clicking on the framed Yahoo page, finding the framed page URL, and then opening that page in a new tab / window and making a bookmark out of it.  I know it’s a very inconvenient way of doing it, but it will at least do the trick until we can get the kuboTEN watchlist coded.

Mentioning something like business hours in the FAQ would be nice, so we’d know how fast you’ll be able to respond to our auction/order requests and at what times you would be available. Especially for time-sensitive things like auctions, the time period of 24 hours for a bid to be posted might be too long, such as for auctions posted with a 2 day lifespan that get noticed late. This is just a suggestion though and I’m not presuming to tell you how to run this site and to keep “business hours” that might conflict with how you’re planning to make improvements.

Cheers

Oh, one more thing. I just placed my first order with you, yay! The thing is can you add something to help us keep track of auction/order forms we’ve submitted? Unless it’s supposed to appear on the “Pending Bids & Orders” page where I’m not seeing anything.

Make that two things After placing a shop order, I’m directed to page that says:

Place a Yahoo! Japan Auction Bid

yaluen, thank you for your order! We will contact you shortly with a full cost breakdown.

Return to the ordering page.

I’m guessing it should say “Japanese Shop Order” instead so it corresponds with the order page and not cause any confusion.

Yaluen, your excellent suggestions and error catches are highly valued.  Maybe we should put you on our payroll? 

It’s true, while we use 24 hours as the total safe limit to have a bid placed, during business hours bids are usually placed within 1-2 hours and most often within a few minutes of being received.  While at this moment we can’t guarantee bids placed during business hours will be entered within 2 hours, I think it would be good to mention that in most cases they will be entered much more quickly than one might assume with the 24 hour window.

We are actually currently in development on a system that will allow for live bids and scheduled snipes, but the system is still a ways off.

Oh, one more thing. I just placed my first order with you, yay! The thing is can you add something to help us keep track of auction/order forms we’ve submitted? Unless it’s supposed to appear on the “Pending Bids & Orders” page where I’m not seeing anything.

This is something we’re trying to get fixed right away, so that you will have the bids and orders you’ve entered instantly shown on your Bids & Orders page.  As it stands at the moment, it will usually take up to a couple hours for the bid/order to be processed and then it will show up on your bids & orders page.  I’ll see about putting a disclaimer up that they won’t show up until processed on the page.

I think you should have a clear page entilted fees and make the easier to find!
I like the no deposits however!
Also some shipping rates would be nice depending on weight and some examples like a cd would be so much shipping and other things like that.

Thank you very much for your suggestions!  Those improvements should be pretty easy to implement, so we’ll hopefully be able to get a dedicated fees page done sooner rather than later.

Any chance of working out a real time bidding system aswell?
I know my bids end up placed in the middle of the night if I place them at 5PM (because of time diffrence I suppose).I try to bid before I got to sleep or first thing in the morning.

Yes, we are currently in development on a real-time bidding system that will allow you to bid on auctions without any delay.  We are also looking into the possibility of including a scheduled bidding system, so you can set your bids for a certain time and have them fire while you are away from the computer.  In order to make the real-time system feasible, we would require a deposit.  However, we’d still be offering our regular no-deposit bid reviewed service as well.  You’d have the choice of:

1) real-time bidding w/ a deposit required
2) reviewed bidding w/ no deposit required.

Please lower the basic fee to $5 for anything that costs less than 1000 yen.

From 1 yen to 1000 yen - $5

From 1001 yen and upwards - $10

I hope you will consider this kuboCRAIG, cause there were many occasions that I wanted to buy something that’s only 500 yen or 800 yen, but adding $10 basic fee was way to steep compared to the item’s price.

Thanks for the suggestion gamingdude!

We will have to consider implementing something like this, since I do agree that paying $10 for something you win for 200 yen is a bit much.

I don’t think we’ll be able to do it for $5 though, since we have to cover any bank transfer fees and the like within the basic fee (we don’t charge these fees to our customers unlike most of our competitors).  The fees charged by banks for transfers and payments and the costs involved in occasionally needing to repack items are the reason why we have to charge $10 basic fee on even small items at the moment.

Once our system becomes more automated in our site update, we will be in a better position to evaluate our fees on sub-1000 yen items.  Hopefully we’ll be able to manage something that will help us reduce costs and offer lower fees for sub-1000 yen items!

Hi Craig,

I’m new here but have been using deputy service for along time to buy stuff from Japan.

I’m currently using one deputy service because it has among the cheapest commission, friendly,honest and understanding guy ,no deposit, great services, no mark up shipping and no hidden fees.It just reflects your service from what I’ve red in this forum. That’s why this site caught my eye and I just went on to register and post this blabla here
BUT the only difference between his and your service is he didn’t charge the paypal cc/transaction fees!
I think you already know which one is it. (Hint: His office located at the same prefecture as yours and the owner has a name that resembles your company.. coincidence or..? lol)

So my question is, could it be possible that you also could just swallow those paypal fees and offer standard 10usd + 7% (auction/store) and 10 usd + 5% (shop) for paypal via cc users? You could be a big new winner (at least for me) if you could offer that.

I wish you the best success in your business.

-Ahmad-

Hi Ahmad,

Thanks for joining us and having a look around!  We very much appreciate your feedback and will definitely take your suggestion under consideration.  We are always looking for ways to help reduce the overhead costs of transactions and to pass these savings on to our members.

I assure you, any similarity to a competing service’s owner’s name is purely coincidental!  Kubo actually is a pretty common last name in Japan, and the “ten” portion relates to the Japanese for “store” or “shop”.  In fact, my surname is not Kubo but I picked it up as a nickname somehow when I was visiting Okinawa many years ago. (o_o);

Is there any chance that we can address a question in English for Kuboten to translate and send to people on Yahoo! Auctions? The reason I ask is because I tend to buy clothes on MBok and Yahoo! Auctions, but often the sellers neglect to include measurements and even what gender the clothing is intended for.