Yahoo! Japan introduced an English version of Yahoo! Japan Auctions on October 10th, 2008. Its target audience is foreign residents in Japan who can communicate in basic Japanese but prefer to use an English interface.
Yahoo! Japan Auctions is the biggest Internet auction site in Japan.
The major drawback of the English site is that only items whose sellers have checked the ‘display on English site’ option are shown. Currently, only a few items are shown on the English site. Also, it is not possible to sell an item through the English site at the moment.
The English version of Yahoo! Japan Auctions is the opposite of Sekaimon [JP], a Japanese version of eBay.
[Updated] Yahoo! Japan made a quick decision to shut down the English version just after half an year. Release [J]
Shunichi Arai
As mentioned, the biggest problem is a very small percentage of sellers actually list on the International site, from what I have seen it would have been less than 1%.
When this was first announced we were hoping to see something more interesting done in the translation/cross over side of things, perhaps bridging the language and shipping barriers.
Sekaimon isn’t an actual auction site, it’s a scam.
They are becoming known as bidding under names other than Sekaimon on eBay, not telling sellers they are a third party sending items out of the country. There is nothing on their eBay profiles stating this. Since some sellers state they do not sell to buyers outside the US, this underhand tactic bypasses the sellers stated decision not to sell outside the US. Sekaimon has sellers ship to shipping companies here in the US and then items go to unknown addresses overseas. You would think sellers would not be liable once it made it to that shipping company in the US. Think again.
Sellers are getting hit with numerous Paypal claims from the Sekaimon eBay accounts and are losing all of them. Sellers have no recourse except to cancel the sales and block as many of the Sekaimon accounts as they can find.
I do think this is all illegal but try finding someone willing to investigate it. Since eBay signed a business agreement with Sekaimon eBay won’t do anything and since eBay owns Paypal it sure comes up as very shady that Sekaimon files Paypal claims left and right, fails to provide evidence of damaged or lost items and the sellers still lose.