#this is gonna be the cover art for the artbook btw~

[wombywoo]

strange exaltations ♥︎

[oneroom-disco]

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

〰️〰️〰️〰️

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

〰️〰️〰️〰️

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

〰️〰️〰️〰️

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!