Hey Bebe! Dunno if you still check your tumblr but thought I'll try anyways. I remember you showed you bought FGO fan art books before on twitter (I think it was Tezca's, I don't recall if you bought others...), and was wondering if you got them through a proxy service? I think you're in the country same as me, and I was thinking of pre-ordering an FGO fanbook from C105, but I heard customs is a nightmare... So I was wondering which proxy service you used. Sorry if this question makes you uncomfortable! You can just ignore this question if it does.
hey sure I’ll be glad to answer it, I use two services:
AOCS - the easiest way for me, tora even has a page on advertising their service. As of now they waive domestic shipping fee to their warehouse so you could really save a lot. You can store your orders for up to 30 days, storage can be extended for another 30 days (total 60 days). The storage extension used to be free but starting Feb 2025 they’ll start charging for a fee. No details yet but it should be cheaper than paying for international shipping multiple times. Tho note that the max orders you can consolidate is up to 10 orders.
One thing I like ordering on tora is there’s an one click button for preorder/purchase, esp useful when you need to fight others for really popular books (when umino chica’s oberon book PO was up the server died LMAO), so you could skip the confirmation screen and place order right away and save time
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Tenso - sometimes the artist might opt for melonbooks instead so I will need to ship to tenso first before getting them shipped to msia. This is what I used when ordering the tez artbook. You get a local jp address then you can start shopping. Note that recently visa/mastercard are no longer accepted on tora/melonbooks so I was using amex (if you buy on tora using aocs you can use visa/master via paypal).
You gotta pay domestic shipping for each melon order so it’s best if you could add them to cart together, tho if it’s a really popular book sometimes I’ll just place that order first (just did it for takolegs 🤪). I’m preordering a few more of takolegs’ older books (it’s only open tomorrow) so gonna try out that grouping function later to see how that works.
There’s few options for melon shipping: the cheaper mail delivery メール便 or courier 宅配便, depending on your order size/weight sometimes you can only go with 宅配便.
Once your orders arrived at tenso they will notify you, even tho they say you could store for 60 days but if you’re like me wanting to consolidate several orders it’s effectively only 30 days since the first parcel arrival date. I send my aniplex+ and pixiv booth orders to tenso too. Oh yeah started in Aug 2024 tenso starts collecting 10% SST for msian orders even tho supposedly books should be tax free 🙃 I never had to pay taxes for my aocs book orders
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there’s buyee but I don’t use it coz 1) I can navigate jp websites, 2) I think you gotta wait for buyee agent to get back to you? and stuff so by the time they do the item might be sold out already so I trust myself to buy popular stuff way quicker
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I haven’t had too much issues with customs so far (been using aocs since 2022), but once they opened my aocs parcel for inspection and ripped some of the books plastic wrapping and didn’t place them back properly so one of my book cover got bent URGH. The other one time I got randomly inspected again and they charged me for inspection at some ministry (srsly?), so I paid poslaju to act as agent (rm60+) then the parcel is released and delivered to me eventually.
also if you’re from msia, I wouldn’t recommend buying r18 books in case your parcel does get opened for inspection it will get confiscated. Iinm aocs straight up rejects tora r18 orders for msian customers coz they had too much troubles with customs in the past.
Btw the eta date on tora/melon is just for reference, in rare cases it happened to me where the tora preorder is way beyond its original eta date (like a month?) so I ended up have to ship my pending orders on aocs first since storage limit is up
um wow this ended up way longer than I tot, thanks for reading up to this point and happy hunting for those doujins!
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Quite impressed by how they packed everything. They packed everything in 4 layers, each with a piece of cardboard and bubble wrap in between. Probably not the most eco-friendly but I loved how they treated everything with such care! Though I think it was mostly packed this way coz though I actually made 3 orders, Toranoana sent everything to AOCS in 4 separate shipments…
Shipment from Toranoana to AOCS is free and I think AOCS is a department inside Toranoana? As I think one of the words one the shipping invoices meant ‘internal courier’ or something to that effect.
Anyway, AOCS allows you to combine orders and will store your orders for free for at most 2 months, so I took advantage of that!
My first order was G’s Magazine plus the limited edition of the A3! Everlasting LP as I had a coupon code for preorder items. I wanted G’s Magazine for their omake items which include a Tenka Hyakken Zan 4th anniversary clear file, shitajiki (pencil board) and poster, plus the Toranoana version comes with an additional postcard! I’m so happy that one of the sides of the clear file shows a full body image of Kuwana (2nd image)~ :3 I love her~! The skimpiness of her outfits don’t really suit her personality, IMO. But maybe showing off so much chest is a Honda sword thing coz look at Tonbokiri! XD;;
My second order was the limited edition of volume 10 of the CCS Clear Card manga as it comes with a brand-new character song duet for Sakura and Syaoran! I only recently found out about this and needed a copy. It was sold out on Amazon JP but Toranoana still had copies so… Then I saw Ichigo on the cover of this Tourabu Manga Anthology and added it to my order… sadly, though Ichigo is on the cover, he doesn’t appear in any of the stories or illustrations inside… I feel so cheated… orz
Then my third and final order was Pinkpompom’s super cute new Baby Kuwana-kun doujinshi~!! It’s so cute and fluffy~!!
Everything arrived at AOCS on 14 April. I immediately paid and chose DHL as my shipping method as it was actually cheaper than EMS! So I got my package very quickly the next morning on 15 April. AOCS shipped it less than one hour after I paid!
Been a long while since I’ve ordered anything from Toranoana and this time I’ve decided to try out their official (?) forwarding service AOCS instead of asking my proxy to help me.
I ordered yesterday (1 Dec 2020) afternoon and my order is still being processed as I’m writing this. Toranoana is supposed to send my order to AOCS for free. Next, AOCS will calculate the total plus international shipping and send me my order after I pay them. I only need to pay AOCS.
Anyway, I mainly wanted the two new doujinshi by Pinkpompom - one about Kuwana-kun (I’ll post some previews that the artist posted in another post later) and one about baby Ichigo. (I love that one of my fave artists likes the same swords as me~! XD) Pinkpompom’s art and stories are just so fluffy, sweet and really cute~ :3c The baby Ichigo one is about him going to kindergarten with his bestie, chibi Kuninaga (i.e. baby Tsuru).
Then I added two MikaIchi (the cover of the other one isn’t shown here), one ShokuIchi, one IchiMika, one fanmade Tourabu costume pattern book for Obitsu 11 which looks quite interesting, an MKR all-character book, two TasuTsumu and some clear file and can badge storage things that I want to try out.
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AOC’s 27-inch 1440p QD-OLED gaming monitor is down to $380
It’s tough not to gush about a 27-inch 1440p QD-OLED gaming monitor that costs under $400 (I’ve done it before!). AOC’s G-Sync-compatible model with a 240Hz refresh rate and a near-instant response time is down to $379.99 at Best Buy, which matches the lowest price I’ve ever seen for a model with these specs. This seems like a great entry-level OLED for your gaming desktop or laptop setup; it has…