First Look - Rakuten Ichiba International

Rakuten Ichiba is a large internet shopping mall in Japan. There are over 22,000 shops open over there and approximately millions of different products were listed in their web directory. Since so many shops were setup in a single mall, we are expecting many different pricing and products comes up in the directory search from range of electronics, clothing, toys, games and others.

I’m not going to do any review on this site, but I will just gives you a quick heads up what I discover during my search on toys. It is quite an impressive marketing idea behind this system for my own view because you can also do pre-ordering too. At the same time, it is a bit complicated too whiles not every local shop opens their doors for international buyer’s access to their goods.

However, there are few things you also need to take notes.

• Firstly, many items might include tax. Since most of the shops are originally not an online stores. You will be buying those things under local price and probably more expensive compare to the other online stores.
• Secondly, not every of them offer their goods for sell to international buyers which I mention above. I discover this issue when I tried to place my order for limited Gundam that only available in Japan. Although I don’t quite understand why, it also didn’t give much information about it too.
• Lastly, the shipping handling will be either prepare by Rakuten Ichiba or the local shops so expecting different EMS shipping charges.

Anyway, I find out about this shopping mall when I was browsing around Singapore forum few months ago which I wanted to post it a long time. There are quite a lot of positive feedbacks purchasing from Rakuten Ichiba and even says that their price is better. I not really sure about it but you guys should check out yourself and decide.

Happy Christmas shopping! Another note, HLJ is doing it again this Monday! Prepare your credit card!