Deputy Services: Japamart.com

Hi everybody, I just wanted to share my experience with Japamart.com.

I've been using one of the "top three" services up until recently. But I was forced to look for another one for a couple of reasons: First, they kept "forgetting" to place my bids. Secondly, I didn't want to open a premium account with my credit card for my own personal reasons (Read: I have a wife and I don't want her to see how much money I spend on cels :-)

So I found Japamart.com which allows you to do your own bidding without needing a credit card. You send them a deposit that you send them by PayPal. Just like most of the services you can bid twice as much as your available deposit.

They claim that it may take 1-3 for the deposit to be reflected on your account but it has never taken more than 30 minutes for me. Also, you can choose to apply your deposit to the invoice or pay separately and leave the deposit alone. This is simply done by the push of a button.

The bidding is very simple. You either browse or input the auction ID from their site and you will get a toolbar at the top which you can use to "Watch" the auction or bid on it.

The "My Account" section of their site is great though it could use a better interface design. All the information you need is there: Shipping tracking, paid and unpaid invoices, exchange rate, etc. And for every step of the process you get an email so you don't have to keep checking the site for updates. They even tell you when they reeived the item so you can requested it.

The one thing I don't like is the fact that you only have 10 days from the day they receive your item to make a request for it or you will be charged a fee of $1 per day after that. This is not a big deal for me, though.

The fees seem pretty good to me even though I admit that I haven't done a thourough comparison with other sites.

As far as their responsiveness I only had to contact them twice and they replied immediately.

In short this is a very well designed system and I'm thoroughly happy with it.

It's nice to know other peoples' experiences with some of the smaller/less well-known deputy services. I'd never heard of Japamart until now but they sound good as an alternative. ^_^

I don't mean to high-jack the thread in any way but another good smaller deputy is okshon.com Same sorta principle with the deposits. Make a deposit by Paypal and the bid limit is five times the amount. However, I've found the main advantage of this one to be that when you make the Paypal payment, the amount is updated immediately into your balance. No waiting around time for your bid limit to be manually updated. So you can spot an auction with less than 10 minutes to go, log into your account, make a deposit and bid in time. Handy for those kind of auctions if nothing else. ^_^ Just thought I'd spread the word on that one.

Wow. Five times the amount? That could get me in trouble.

I've heard about them but for some reason I missed those details. I will definitely keep that in mind for whenever I'm short of money and/or time. Thanks for the tip.

Shopping Mall Japan also has a 5X bid amount on "cash" balances (i.e. not simple credit card holds).