Buyee vs FromJapan 2026: The ¥500 Flips Twice

Line the fees up and there is nothing to compare. FromJapan asks ¥500. Buyee asks ¥500.

Yet the answer changes three times depending on what you are buying. One item, no cover: a draw. Add cover: FromJapan. Add a second item: Buyee.

None of that turns on the amount. It turns on what the ¥500 is charged against, and what it buys.

Is the fee really identical?

FromJapan charges ¥500 per item. Multiple units of the same item paid together count as one (official).

Buyee charges ¥500 per order (official). Its own page is explicit about what an order absorbs: two or more successful bids inside one order stay at the flat ¥500, and multiple purchases from the same store stay at the flat ¥500.

Buy exactly one thing and the two are the same to the yen. Priced end to end on a ¥30,000 item (fee plus each service’s own currency conversion) Buyee comes to $203.13 and FromJapan to $203.43.

Thirty cents. For practical purposes, a draw.

What separates them is the unit, and what the unit includes.

The first reversal: what ¥500 buys

FromJapan does not call its ¥500 a purchase fee. It calls it a Product Protection Plan, and lists what comes with it:

• Free storage, 60 days
• Item consolidation
• Guarantee for trades inside Japan
• Check service, confirmation that the right item arrived undamaged
• Guarantee for international shipping

Buyee’s ¥500 includes none of that. Cover and packing are sold as plans on top: Standard ¥500, Insured Delivery ¥500, Inspection ¥300, Lite ¥0. Lite is the free one, and it comes with no packing options.

Match the two on what you actually receive and Buyee’s side reads ¥500 + ¥500 = ¥1,000. FromJapan’s stays at ¥500.

For one item you want covered until it lands, FromJapan is ¥500 cheaper. That is the first reversal, and it is invisible in any table that lists only the headline fee.

The second reversal: the second item

The advantage survives exactly one purchase.

Buyee’s ¥500 is charged once against the order, so the count does not move it. FromJapan’s is charged against each item, so it scales.

One qualification matters more than the table. Buyee’s “order” is not “shopping trip.” On Mercari every listing belongs to a different seller, so three items means three orders, ¥1,500. Three items from one store stays ¥500. Whether your basket sits with one seller or five decides how large this gets.

Priced through on five items from a single store, the totals come to $203.13 for Buyee against $216.77 for FromJapan (the full currency workings are here).

Currency: both mark it up, and it barely matters

Neither service converts at the market rate, and neither publishes the spread.

Read directly off each site on 3 August 2026 at 12:27 JST, Buyee applied ¥150.15 to the dollar and FromJapan ¥149.93. Measured against the ¥157.48 market reference Buyee prints on its own page, those are markups of 4.88% and 5.04%.

FromJapan’s is marginally worse. Marginally: thirty cents on a ¥30,000 order, and $669.33 against $670.31 on ¥100,000. One dollar.

The comparison that does matter is with the services outside this pair. Neokyo and Remambo bill in yen and add nothing on conversion, which lands the same ¥30,000 order at $195–199. Buyee and FromJapan both sit more than $8 above that. The ¥500 fee this article is about is roughly $3.16. Whichever of these two you pick, the currency decision already cost you more than the fee.

Shipping (figures measured on different days)

⚠️ The two columns below were not measured on the same day. Buyee’s shipping quotes come from a tool behind a login and could not be re-run; FromJapan’s calculator is public. Buyee’s figures are from 29 July 2026, FromJapan’s from 11 August 2026. Same parcel both times: 2kg, destination United States.

DHL is effectively identical, ¥7 apart. ECMS shows Buyee ¥1,463 cheaper. Thirteen days separate the readings, so treat the ECMS gap as an indication rather than today’s price. We will update this when both can be quoted on one day.

One further observation, offered as what we saw rather than as policy: FromJapan’s calculator returned no EMS option for the United States. Changing the weight did not bring it back. No official page we found explains why.

Storage: longer on one side, clearer on the other

FromJapan’s free window is twice as long (official), which suits collecting slowly and shipping once.

Buyee charges daily by weight past 30 days and disposes of anything still in the warehouse 90 days after arrival (official). The free period is shorter, but the ending is written down.

⚠️ What happens after FromJapan’s 60 days (extension, disposal, or something else) we could not find. That is a gap in our research, not evidence that the company fails to publish it.

Reputation runs the other way

Everything above favours Buyee on cost as soon as you buy more than one thing. Customers rate it lower.

Scores read 14 August 2026.

Reading FromJapan’s reviews turns up something more useful than the average. Across the sample we read on 11 August 2026, 15 of 40 negative reviews and 22 of 35 positive reviews were about the same thing: how support handled the case.

The most common reason to praise FromJapan and the most common reason to be angry at it are the same department. That is not a company with good service or bad service. It is a company whose outcome varies, and the score is the average of two different experiences.

The clause worth reading before you bid

FromJapan’s terms carry a provision that costs money in a situation you did not choose (service rules, article 11).

If a seller deletes the winning bid on an auction and you are left as the highest bidder, you are obliged to buy. Customer Service will ask you to authorise the charge within three days. If you do not, or if you ask to cancel, you agree to pay whichever is higher of ¥2,000 or 30% of the winning price.

⚠️ This is not a general cancellation fee. It applies to that specific situation. FromJapan’s ordinary position is that bids and orders cannot be cancelled once placed.

Which one to choose

Choose Buyee if

• You are buying more than one item, especially from one store. The fee stops at ¥500
• You want the lowest possible outlay and will skip cover (Lite, ¥0)
• You would rather know exactly what happens when storage runs out

Choose FromJapan if

• You are buying a single item and want it covered. Insurance, inspection, consolidation and 60 days of storage are inside the ¥500
• You are collecting over weeks before shipping once
• You want the better-rated service, accepting that the rating hides a split

FAQ

Which is cheaper, Buyee or FromJapan?

Identical on one item, ¥500 each. Buyee from the second item onward, because its ¥500 covers a whole order while FromJapan charges ¥500 per item. Five items is ¥500 against ¥2,500. The exception is Mercari, where each seller is a separate Buyee order, so three sellers costs ¥1,500.

Does that change if I want insurance?

Yes, and it reverses. FromJapan’s ¥500 already includes shipping cover, an inspection check, consolidation and 60 days of storage. Buyee sells the equivalent as a plan at ¥500 on top of its ¥500 fee, so a single covered item costs ¥1,000 through Buyee against ¥500 through FromJapan.

Which one loses more on the exchange rate?

Effectively neither. Buyee marks the rate up 4.88% and FromJapan 5.04%, which is thirty cents apart on a ¥30,000 order and one dollar on ¥100,000. Both are around $8 worse than Neokyo and Remambo, which bill in yen and add nothing.

Which is cheaper to ship with?

We cannot say for today. Quoting 2kg to the United States, Buyee on 29 July and FromJapan on 11 August, DHL came out ¥5,135 against ¥5,142 and ECMS ¥3,290 against ¥4,753. Buyee’s quotes require a login, so the two readings are thirteen days apart and we have not been able to redo them on one day.

Which is better reviewed?

FromJapan, 4.4 against 3.6 on Trustpilot. But its reviews concentrate on support in both directions (15 of 40 negative and 22 of 35 positive reviews in our sample were about how support handled the case), so the average covers two very different experiences.

The bottom line

The fee was never the question. Both charge ¥500, and on one uncovered item the totals land thirty cents apart.

What the ¥500 is measured against decides everything after that. Per item, it buys protection and grows with your basket. Per order, it buys nothing extra and stays still.

• One item, no cover, a draw
• One item, covered, FromJapan, by ¥500
• Two or more: Buyee, and by ¥2,000 at five items

There is a larger number underneath all of it. Both of these services convert your money at their own rate, and both land more than $8 above the services that bill in yen on a ¥30,000 order. That is roughly two and a half times the fee this whole comparison is about. The figure printed on the fee page is rarely the one that decides the total, a pattern that also runs through our seven-way comparison and our Doorzo vs Buyee head-to-head. Set the same ¥500 against a service that charges a tenth of it and the pattern holds from the other end: in Doorzo vs FromJapan, packing fees make the cheaper fee the dearer total on a single item.