Yahoo Auction

Hi everyone. This is JPC’s mail magazine #4.

Do you remember my story about used cars in stock in the last issue?

Well, I am not going to talk about used cars in stock any more but about Yahoo Auction. The world biggest auction website would easily be “Ebay” (http://ebay.com) but, as you know, they had to pull out of Japan after they unsuccessfully tried to set up their website here. And the reason for that was “Yahoo Auction”, the internet auction website run by Yahoo Japan whose boss is Yahoo USA.

Exactly the same as Ebay, Yahoo Auction is a Consumer to Consumer (C2C) trade. When a person has something he/she wants to sell, with a small fee, he/she can list it on the marketplace called Yahoo Auction; then people who want it place their bids. There are of course some dealers, not only individuals who use this as their main trading place.

Not only buying used cars from used car website and shipping them on our customers’ behalf, we are sometimes asked to place a bid at Yahoo Auction for them. Customers think that they might be able to get cars cheaper from there because it is a C2C trade, but as for the car trade, 90% of the sellers are used car dealers. Although I have not checked this properly, if we check their trading history and the list of the items they are selling, you can tell that their main trade is cars. It means that there exists average prices at Yahoo Auction, which are usually about 5-10% lower than other internet used car dealers’ auctions. (See our website for the average prices for used cars at dealers’ auctions: http://jpctrade.com/auction/japaneseusedcarauctiondealdatabase.htm)

The reason for the cheaper prices at Yahoo Auction could be because, there are no trading rules as it is C2C trade, there are always risks of the cars not being exactly the same as what you see on the website, or the cars are not the one they promised to you, or the cars may not be delivered to you at all even after the payment. This sort of thing never happens at dealers’ auctions. So when we receive an inquiry about Yahoo Auction, we have to be very careful when we pay and make sure cars get delivered to us.

The other day, we won a sightseeing bus at Yahoo Auction for a customer from Australia. In Australia, there is a restriction on sightseeing bus imports; they have to be manufactured in 1989 and before. So we had to look for something 20 years old. As you can guess, there were not many in good condition although we checked dealers’ auctions every day.

Fortunately, the customer contacted us and said that he had found a good one at Yahoo Auction himself. Checking the seller’s information, we rang him and found out that it had been used as a courtesy bus for a city council. It had regular annual maintenance and we asked for some photos of the bus via email. Looking at them, we thought it was in reasonable condition; we told the customer about this and he wanted us to place a bid on his behalf as soon as possible. So we joined the bidding, and won the auction within his budget.

But it was not the end of it.

The seller was a used car dealership owned by a Sri Lankan man. They did not have a website. All I had was his email address and phone number. How am I supposed to check on him and his business? We had to pay as quickly as possible and actually get the bus after having spent so much time. When I rang him to ask him where the bus was, we found out that it was only 1 hour away by train from our office; one of us went there to have a look at the bus and decided to pay in cash. So we gave it to our transport company the next day to take it to the port for shipping to Australia.

Yahoo Auction is a free market: you have to trade at your own risk. But if you can control the risk tactfully, you sometimes can get a good bargain. Please contact me if you see any cars you like at Yahoo Auction.

(Yahoo Auction)
★English:
http://www.excite.co.jp/world/english/web/?wb_url=http%3A%2F%2Flist1.auctions.yahoo.co.jp %2Fjp%2F26360%2Dcategory.html%3Falocale%3D0jp&wb_lp=JAEN&wb_dis=2
　
★Japanese:
http://list1.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/26360-category.html

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★ Japanese used car stock : http://jpctrade.com/stock/index.html
★ JPCTRADE Home page : http://jpctrade.com/
★ JPCTRADE Blog : http://jpctrade.blogspot.com/

(Editor)
JPC TRADE CO.,LTD.
Kato building 4F, 1-1-2 Furuishiba, Koto-ku, Tokyo
Japan Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association (JUMVEA)
TEL : +81-3-5245-7731
FAX : +81-3-3643-4955