What does a Japan proxy service actually cost?
A proxy service buys something in Japan on your behalf and forwards it to you. Every one of them advertises a service fee of a few hundred yen, and every one of them ends up charging you several times that. The fee is not where the money goes.
This site runs the whole calculation — the item, the service fee, packing, domestic postage inside Japan, international postage by weight band, deposit and payment fees, and the import tax your own country charges when the parcel lands — for FROM JAPAN, Buyee, ZenMarket, Neokyo, across 9 destination countries.
Why no single service is “the cheapest”
They do not charge on the same unit, so the ranking is not a fixed list — it is a function of your order.
| Service | Service fee | Charged |
|---|---|---|
| FROM JAPAN | ¥500 | per item |
| Buyee | ¥500 | per order (several items from one shop cost the same as one) |
| ZenMarket | ¥300–¥800 | per item, plus 3.5% of the whole transaction |
| Neokyo | ¥350 | per item, plus packing charged by weight |
Buying three different items from one shop costs one fee at a service that charges per order and three at a service that charges per item. A percentage-based deposit fee is invisible on a ¥3,000 order and the largest single line on a ¥100,000 one. Packing charged by weight does not matter for a paperback and matters a great deal for a boxed figure.
A worked example
A ¥10,000 item from Mercari Japan, about 1 kg once packed, sent to the United States by EMS, with ¥700 of domestic postage inside Japan:
| # | Service | Pay the proxy | Pay on delivery | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | FROM JAPAN | ¥16,500 | not estimated | ¥16,500 +duty |
| 2 | Buyee | ¥16,500 | not estimated | ¥16,500 +duty |
| 3 | Neokyo | ¥16,850 | not estimated | ¥16,850 +duty |
| 4 | ZenMarket | ¥17,409 | not estimated | ¥17,409 +duty |
FROM JAPAN wins that order at ¥16,500. Take the identical order and make the parcel 3 kg instead of 1 kg and FROM JAPAN still wins, at ¥21,500 — but the gap to the others has moved. That is the whole reason this site exists: the answer depends on the order, so it has to be calculated rather than looked up.
Before price: can it even leave Japan?
Model paint, spray cans, lighters, airsoft, blades and anything with a loose lithium battery are refused by some or all of these companies, and some are refused by Japan Post regardless of which company you use. The refusal happens at the warehouse, after you have paid for the item and its domestic postage — none of which comes back. So shippability is checked before a price is shown, and a service that will not export your item is never presented as the cheapest option. See what you cannot ship out of Japan.
Import tax is your country's rule, not the proxy's
All a proxy decides is whether it collects the tax at checkout or leaves you to pay the courier at the door. Fold that into a single number and the companies that collect honestly up front look expensive, so every total here is split into what you pay now and what you pay on arrival. The United States suspended its $800 duty-free threshold in 2025 and the EU abolished its €150 threshold in July 2026, so low-value parcels that used to arrive untaxed no longer do.
Start here
- What you cannot ship out of Japan — read before you bid
- Cheapest proxy to the United States, by marketplace
- What you cannot ship out of Japan
- FROM JAPAN fees explained
- Buyee fees explained
- ZenMarket fees explained
- Neokyo fees explained
- How these numbers are worked out — sources, method, and what is deliberately left out
- Every page on this site
Fee data checked 2026-08-07 against each provider's official pages. Estimates only — see how we calculate.