Shasha~ wrote:Guyyssss
Help me buy some Anime merch.
Do you guys know any only stores that relatively cheap stuff and are trust worthy?
And not those places where the item cost $2 but shipping costs $10
;u;
I have a lack of merch...I need to show my pride...
xD
Some things about this -
In Japan, anime merch is absurdly cheap. Plenty of times, figures that sell for 50/60 USD outside of Japan are only about 8 USD in Japan. And unfortunately the only way you're getting merchandise at the Japanese prices is if you buy a) from a seller in Japan or b) from a seller who gets their stuff from Japan. Meaning either way, shipping is going to be ridiculously expensive because it's coming from Japan.
However, if you're looking for cheaper shipping, that usually means paying more for the product because they already factored the cost of shipping it to their store in the final price.
Mandarake is one of my favorite merchandise stores in Japan. They have multiple locations, but each location is like a massive warehouse of pre-owned anime/video game merchandise (including the DVDs or games themselves). Most of the time, people will win items from UFO machines that they didn't necessarily want, or they got the wrong figure from blind boxes, so they'll take it to Mandarake to get a couple hundred yen back. They have a site in English and you can browse a lot of the stuff in their stores. The site will even tell you which store location the item can be found at. However, to buy the item, you're going to be paying a whole buttload for someone in Japan to ship them to you. So really, this defeats the purpose of buying the item really cheap. Sure, you can get a really awesome figure for 50 USD that would be like 100 USD overseas, but when you have to pay 40 dollars to get it shipped to you, it's hardly worth it. The same is going to be true for most merch sites that have Japanese prices. However, Mandarake also has loads and loads of rare or hard-to-get items for auction on their site. So in that case you may find it's worth it.
With all that depressing heartbreaking stuff being said, I have to say that my favorite place to order merchandise from is AmiAmi. It's a website that sells the newest products, meaning the older stuff or really high-demand stuff is always sold out. But if you watch it like a hawk, it can actually be a really good means of buying the newest stuff coming out right now. AmiAmi is where I buy all of my anime merchandise that I don't buy when I'm in Japan. Their prices aren't the cheapest, but the prices are very very competitive, and the best thing is that for most places the shipping isn't going to break your bank. So I say try there? Unless you're trying to get merch for older series.
I think J-List is also a really good place to try, but I notice their prices are all over the freaking place. Sometimes their most recent figures and merch is competitive with AmiAmi, though.