Hobby Search

[bill937ca]

Hobby Search has added some additional sale items to its Model Train Bargain store.  Most items are 25% off, but some are 35% off or 50% off.  Here's a couple of 50% off examples.  There may only be 1 of each.

 

Series 711-100/200 New Color Air Conditioner Remodeling with Single Arm Pantograph (3-Car Set) (Model Train)

 

http://www.1999.co.jp/eng/10080440

 

Series 783 Blue Line Paint Limited Express `Hyper Kamome` (9-Car Set) (Model Train)

 

http://www.1999.co.jp/eng/10073200

 

 

 

http://www.1999.co.jp/eng/list/758/0/1

[David]

If you want the original set of TomyTec Portram shells, they're at 40% too.

[clem24]

Even more interesting is the 50% off shipping campaign! Oh man I just dumped $1,000 on trains on my last CC bill. Don't need anymore 

[David]

Even more interesting is the 50% off shipping campaign! Oh man I just dumped $1,000 on trains on my last CC bill. Don't need anymore  

 

Where are the details of this? Does it apply to all items? EMS/SAL? I saw a few messages about a June-July free SAL promotion on a few items but it disappeared.

 

EDIT: Ok, now this is showing on at least some items:

 

PayPal Shipping 50% Off Campaign Underway From June 16 Until July 11!

Check the price, beyond belief and never found anywhere else!

Sending direct from Japan, reaching you Within Days!

Shipping is 50% off only if you pay via PayPal.

 

Anyone know if this applies to EMS?

[cteno4]

HobbySearch appears to have a half off shipping special going on if you use paypal june 16 - July 11. not sure if its both sal and ems but they do say have your items in a few days so im guessing its ems for sure. while paypal may cost a few percent more than some cc for the currency exchange could really pay off on ems shipping!

 

only seems to appear on the top of product pages right now, not on the home page

 

PayPal Shipping 50% Off Campaign Underway From June 16 Until July 11!

Check the price, beyond belief and never found anywhere else!

Sending direct from Japan, reaching you Within Days!

Shipping is 50% off only if you pay via PayPal.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Claude_Dreyfus]

Interesting...

 

I thought I saw an announcement the other day proclaiming free postage for Paypal purchases, however when I logged back on a little later the message had completely vanished. Perhaps it was a typo on their part.

 

Postage is a big expense for me, and I have a couple of items due this month which hopefully will fall under this offer. You never know, it might go the same way as their other offers and become permanent! 

[clem24]

If this Paypal shipping sale is anything like the one at HLJ, then it will be a very limited offer. HLJ offered set quantities of this discount. The first x # of people would get it, and as soon as they were all used up, or past the expiry date, whichever came first, the deal was over. Except in HLJ's case, the deal sold out in less than 24 hours!

[Darklighter]

while paypal may cost a few percent more than some cc for the currency exchange

It's possible to disable the automatic currency conversion and let PayPal charge your CC in Yen!

[KenS]

The HS blog has a link to a shipping rate page describing the sale: apparently it's both EMS and SAL, and is for orders and pre-orders placed through 11 July, as long as Paypal is used.

 

http://www.1999.co.jp/ems.asp

[cteno4]

cool, this info was not there when i found the sale yesterday! odd they would start the info on all the pages and fill in the info pages last!

 

oooh i fear what this may do the cc!

 

in looking at past charges it looks like paypal is like 2-2.5% lower exchange rate than the capital one cc gives (it has no foreign exchange charges, others do). I expect this is the paypal charging a fee sort of for the exchange. so it looks like using yen to get charged via paypal to the cc will give the rate i would get if i just charged it directly.thanks fro the tip darklighter!

 

jeff

 

ps this is the time to buy the Kumamoto castle and save a bundle on the shipping! or perhaps a unitram.

[ToniBabelony]

This made me create an account at HS... Just a bit cheaper then HW and they did have some items that HW didn't have in stock. Now I'm awaiting a whole village, a small population and a few rolling stock as well.

[David]

This will make me spend a lot of money, which is bad as I'd already spent at the LHS and I just made an order from MB Klein (Kato E233-1000 and V14 set and some misc) on the weekend. Too bad the one thing I could really use savings on shipping for (Tomix non-sound cab controller) is sold out (maybe being phased out for the upcoming cheaper TomyTec model).

[KenS]

Here's something interesting.  I had two Hobby Search preorders become available for shipping on Friday.  This includes one I'd made selecting the Paypal option, as a test to see how it worked, and another made using my usual credit card payment method back before the sale started. They also included the Viva Aizu I'd ordered late Thursday (an "in stock" item at the time, not a preorder), which was ordered for "credit card" payment. All were EMS shipping. I hadn't done anything to "join" these orders.

 

HS apparent merged them anyway, so it looks like I'm getting the benefit of the reduced shipping cost for all of them.  The only problem with this is that they sent the payment request out at 4:10 PM Saturday, Japan time, so they won't be able to ship them until Monday since I just got the email and paid (if I'd been up at 3 AM I might have paid in time for them to ship last night).  Of course there's nothing that says that even if they'd had the credit card it would have shipped last night.

 

Note: the orders don't show as merged on their site, but the payment was for an amount sufficent to cover all of them and a reasonable amount of postage.

 

On the whole, I'm happy with this, but it did come as a surprise.

 

BTW, as I expected, you don't actually have to have a Paypal account to use the Paypal option.  You get the usual Paypal screen that allows you to pay them with a credit card (and while it "suggests" creating an account, they don't require it). I did notice that they were using an 87.1 Yen/Dollar ratio, and my Apple Calculator suggests that the current rate should be 89.2, but I have no idea what ratio the credit card company would have used if they had done the conversion, and they usually hit me up for an extra "foreign transaction" processing fee, and hopefully I've dodged that one.

 

Assuming no problems arise, I'll be doing my future transactions with HS using Paypal, despite the extra delay it inserts in the process.

[cteno4]

i just ordered the new kato buildings from hs. i did 2 to an order since they are large and about 500g each. worked out about 1000 yen SAL half price each package of two buildings. just got the paypal email and they had combined the orders and wanted 3400Y for shipping all 4 buildings. i emailed to request the two sal shipping and got the response that only one of the buildings can fit in their largest sal box. so either i have to cancel the orders and redo them as one building per order (at about 690 yen half price sal per) or take the combined ems order. guess ill go ahead with the ems for the whole thing as it works out to only 640 yen more.

 

i checked the cc bill for a paypal order last week with hs with my capital one cc (it has no international fees) that i had the paypay charge to it in Yen so the cc would do the exchange. paypal was giving an exchange (with their fees in it) of 87.77 y/d, capital one charge worked out to 90.01 Y/d, so paypal is putting in the international fee of 2.24% which is on par with many ccs these days passing on 2-3% for the international exchange fee that visa/mc is charging them. some ccs still dont charge this to their customers, but with all the new cc regulation i think it will become standard for all in the not to distant future as their revenues from other fees are now being limited. this one is a kosher one that they can pass on as visa/mc gives it to them, would only be if they try to limit visa/mc doing this. in this day in age there is really not much of a cost for this kind of electronic exchange, this comes from the old days when banks would need to keep physical money in different currencies or records with very up to date exchange rates, these days thats all electrons and instantaneous. they just try to hold onto these old fees to keep the revenue...

 

cheers

 

jeff

[to2leo]

Guess I am too late for the Kato office buildings.  They are now on waiting list.  I wonder if I can still get the shipping discount if the item is on waiting list?

[bill937ca]

Guess I am too late for the Kato office buildings.  They are now on waiting list.  I wonder if I can still get the shipping discount if the item is on waiting list?

 

Only if it comes back into stock by July 11th.  

 

Waiting list isn't an order.  You're not guaranteed to get the item if it comes and you're not guaranteed it will come in again (although I think there's no problem here). Also there is no obligation to buy.  It's just simply a notice of new stock.  It probably only be a few days until its in stock because this is a new item.  I sometimes wait list just so I can see how long a new item takes new items to come back into stock.

[bill937ca]

Guess I am too late for the Kato office buildings.  They are now on waiting list.  I wonder if I can still get the shipping discount if the item is on waiting list?

 

Leo, do you realize all four buildings are now back in stock?

[bill937ca]

I've placed a couple of PayPal orders and I find a PayPal order takes about a day longer to be processed.  This mainly because of the extra step in sending the payment. On orders waiting at the start of the workweek, the payment request comes towards the end of the first day Japan time and is acknowledged early on the second day when the order is confirmed as paid. This is followed by a notice of shipment.

[KenS]

So far, both my Paypal orders were placed (either directly or by a pre-order arriving) on a Thursday when HS was open on Saturday. In both, the email notifying me of the order came about a day before the "pay now" email, which was sent after 5 PM Japan time on Saturday (around 6 AM Saturday U.S. Eastern time), so there was no way I was able to get it paid without a delay for the weekend.

 

In both cases, although I paid over the weekend, the shipment notice with the EMS tracking number wasn't sent out until after 10 PM Japan time on Monday (early Monday AM U.S.): 10:37 PM and 10:43 PM, respectively.  However, I think the actual shipment happened sooner, as the first package arrived on Wednesday morning (just two days after the shipment notice, four days total including Sunday after I paid the bill).  In the second case, the timing of the "pay now" request was similar, but I won't have the package until later in the week.

 

The actual elapsed time from order acknowledgement to receipt of package doesn't seem longer (in my sample of one, so far), although I've had quite a bit of variation in the past from HS (including one "in stock" order that waited two weeks while they ordered one item from Kato; very odd that). It's just felt slower, as there's the extra step of paying the Paypal bill, which didn't happen until a day after they acknowledged the order.

[David]

Using Paypal with HS does seem to slow things down. I made an order when the sale started, but it understandably took a while before I got the email because I had made a special request to see if HS could get some Kato replacement parts. However this morning (Thursday) I woke up to 3 emails for complete payment on: The HS SAL order I made on Monday, the HS EMS order I made on Tuesday, and the HW SAL order I made Wednesday. Hopefully all of them will ship before the weekend.

 

This was also my first order with HW - their website is terrible for finding things, and all the order forms are just terrible in terms of layout (stuff doesn't even line up) and detail. However in addition to the fast turn around, and the fact that you can compare the shipping rates before choosing, HW does actually know how to use the Paypal API correctly: When I received the payment link and chose PayPal, the PayPal site was able to show me how much I was about to pay and to whom. By comparison the HS PayPal links don't tell you how much you're paying, and the "continue" button makes it seem like there will be another screen. Instead you just find out that you've just made a payment of x. I'll be going back to using the credit card option with HS after the sale (faster and less confusion), though once I have the chance to see how HW packages things I'm probably going to keep them in mind as a secondary source for stuff that's sold out at HS (that's how I made an order in the first place, I had originally intended to include 2 Koki 200 cars with my HS EMS order, but they sold out almost immediately). As an aside for HS, they *do* know how to package stuff. I received my order from the beginning of the sale on Monday, and everything was individually bubble wrapped (and not just a single layer, you could play basketball with some of those items the wrapping was so thick) and then neatly packed in brown paper.

[Claude_Dreyfus]

This promotion has been extended by another couple of days... Now due to finish on the 15th July.

[David]

This promotion has been extended by another couple of days... Now due to finish on the 15th July.

 

Can they adjust the end date to be just after Kato's definition of "End of July" (7月下旬)

 

And magically restock the 2-car powered set of the Kiha 110 while they're at it...

[CaptOblivious]

In the past, EMS orders from HS have taken right about 72 hours from clicking "yes, I really do want to spend that much money!" to delivery. I made a PayPal purchase on Tuesday, and over 72 hours later, I just got the shipment notification. Considerably slower indeed!

 

Interestingly, as with KenS, the email was sent out a bit after 10PM Tokyo time…I wonder why? Japan Post has no record of the shipment, so I doubt that it was shipped out earlier today. I had hoped to have the package by tomorrow (Saturday)—which, for a Tuesday order, is not an outrageous expectation given past experiences—but it doesn't look like I'll have it until Monday. A shame!

[bill937ca]

In the past, EMS orders from HS have taken right about 72 hours from clicking "yes, I really do want to spend that much money!" to delivery. I made a PayPal purchase on Tuesday, and over 72 hours later, I just got the shipment notification. Considerably slower indeed!

 

That was several years ago, Jeff.  As I recall you haven't been ordering from HS until recently.  I've had many orders ship the same business day in the last year.  PayPal is slower.

[CaptOblivious]

I'm not Jeff :) and I most recently bought from HS last month :D

 

But that's what I'm saying: I place order, they ship immediately, plane flies quickly, customs is prompt, and the truck drive from Chicago to STL is fast. 72 hours from the time I place order to model in my hand. That's faster than most domestic retailers.

 

 

But with the PayPal option, well over 72 hours passed between order placement and mere notification of shipment. Likely it won't ship until tonight. Which means that most likely the total time will be about 120 to 144 hours total. Unacceptable for EMS costs (but just fine when its half off!!)

 

In the past, EMS orders from HS have taken right about 72 hours from clicking "yes, I really do want to spend that much money!" to delivery. I made a PayPal purchase on Tuesday, and over 72 hours later, I just got the shipment notification. Considerably slower indeed!

 

That was several years ago, Jeff.  As I recall you haven't been ordering from HS until recently.  I've had many orders ship the same business day in the last year.  PayPal is slower.