Overall Impressions:
Mandarake is a chain of stores in Japan that sells new & used mixed media, including CD's and Vinyl. The prices are good and they have some less common items that dont show up on Yahoo Auction or Mercari. The webpage is average, kind of old school looking, and the cart has some quarks. They ship to the United States. Packages are very well protected, if you are buying more than a couple items. Neokyo will not proxy order stuff from Mandarake, so I ended up doing a order directly with them a while ago and the experience was great, so I have continued to order from them. As noted below, the only thing to keep in mind is that as long as you order from the same storefronts, the shipping is very competitive. And no proxy fees per item. If you order from different storefronts, the international shipping will hurt, which is where a proxy service would work well. Also, sometimes the page will revert back to Japanese version. you click on "English" at the top and it will switch back to english mode. You can also search in japanese kanji while in english mode. I find that easier if someone sends me a link to original japanese version.
Important Things To Know About Ordering:
Each store front in Mandarake is operated independently as far as shipping. Items are added to a single cart, but are divided up by storefront. When you checkout, you checkout at each store separately. Some stores, like Grand Chaos can calculate shipping immediately and checkout is straight forward. But other stores will require someone to go check the shelf and get the items and then submit a final invoice to you a couple days later. Then you will pay. One thing to know about payment, if you are in the United States, I would suggest using Paypal. The Amazon Pay is Amazon Japan, not Amazon US. So unless you have for sure setup Amazon Japan Pay, you will have to go through other steps outside of Mandarake to set that up...and it may not work with your card or bank. Especially adding a payment method after the invoice was initiated. Additionally, changing your payment method after submitting you initial order is not easy. I believe there is a direct credit card method available at checkout and that did not work for my US based card. I tried to avoid Paypal due to the worse exchange rate they use, but in the end I accepted using it.
User Account:
The User Account page is easily accessible and you can see multiple important items. You can see status of current orders and previous orders. Tracking numbers are also available for each order.
Shipping & Packaging:
They might offer different shipping methods, I always use DHL. DHL is excellent for international shipping, though often higher priced compared to Fedex & UPS. DHL also lets me do blanket signature release on the phone app, so I don't have to worry about being home when the package is delivered. Packaging is very good, when ordering more then a couple items. All items have been in appropriate protective sleeves (including 8cm japanese singles) and bubble wrapped. One time I ordered just 2 items, two 7" vinyl EP's. They were in a somewhat rigid document mailer, with bubble wrap and additional paperboard inside. DHL handled it well and the EP's were in excellent shape, but there was no rigidity to the package. I trust DHL with that, but probably would not trust Fedex.
Ordering multiple items at once, very good packaging.
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