世論 What Japan Thinks

I’ve never taken part in online auctions myself, although I’ve got a bit of rubbish high quality pre-owned goods that I could always get rid of to bring in a few extra pennies. However, it seems that a large minority of Japanese are busy buying and selling, if this recent survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc on auctions is to be believed.

Demographics

On the 6th of March 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research online monitor pool successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.0% of the sample was female, 17.0% in their twenties, 42.1% in their thirties, 23.3% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, and 8.5% in their sixties.

In a survey last week I commented on how a surprisingly high percentage of Japanese spend most online time on Yahoo! but this suggests many of them are busy with auctions!

If you want to take part in Japanese auctions, but you live overseas or cannot read Japanese too well, I usually recommend Rinkya as somewhere that provides a bidding and forwarding service for these sorts of buyers. I’ve not personally used their services, and I’ve indeed not even seen any reviews of their service, and they are not cheap, but if you need items from Japan they seem a good place to check out.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, or check out my weekly newsletter. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve never actually participated in an online auction myself, but the stories I hear about eBay’s security problems and about fraudulent auctions fair put me off wanting to try, despite stories about some people getting lucky. So, I was interested to read a column on japan.internet.com about research conducted by goo Research into the subject of internet auctions.

Demographics

Between the 10th and 13th of July 2007 1,077 members of goo Research’s online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.3% of the sample was male, 17.7% in their teens, 18.8% in their twenties, 16.2% in their thirties, 16.6% in their forties, 18.9% in their fifties, and 11.7% aged sixty or older.

There is, of course, many sites that specialise in highlighting the tat and other interesting rubbish that people try to flog on online auctions; here are a few of my favourites:

Who would buy that?
What the heck?
hexadecimal - the oddities of eBay motors
Strange Japanese auctions
Read the rest of this entry »

At the start of June MyVoice surveyed its internet monitor community to find out about their use of internet auction sites. 14,023, 54% female, successfully completed their private internet-based questionnaire. 3% of the sample were in their teens, 22% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 24% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

Internet auctions is one thing I’ve never done, although I did have two ideas for businesses there than never took off. The first probably required a partner in the USA or UK for bulk shipping, but would consist of buying Hello Kitty mobile phone straps and other cheap nick-nacks, charging $5 on top for postage, and raking in most of the profit, even if sold for list price, on the overcharging for handling. The second was to open lots of bank and credit card accounts all over the place and get the free cartoon character (or even perfumed) plastic cards and pass books, promptly close the accounts then sell the stuff on eBay. Shortly before implementing the scheme, however, I discovered that this was probably highly illegal and would also destroy any credit rating I might have in Japan!
Read the rest of this entry »