Neowing has caught up with my trickery
My perfect strategy for saving up on CD/DVD shipping has been flushed down the infinite void of a JR train station toilet by the insidious conspiracy known as Neowing (better known as CDJapan).
CDJapan has a very flexible pre-ordering system. As long as it’s not a collectible made for pre-order and the item has not yet been released, you are allowed to cancel your orders any time. You can also move, combine and split open orders that have not shipped. And although they charge your credit card the moment you place your order, the charge doesn’t go through and eventually drops if the order is still far from its release date. (They charge it again before shipping.)
The cost of shipping a single CD through EMS is, to say the least, nuts. Not peanuts, just crazy. It takes more than 1000 yen to ship a single that costs about 1000 yen itself. The shipping cost doesn’t scale linearly with the number of items, so generally the more items you group in a single order, the cheaper your shipping is, cheap being a relative term of course.
Unless you are buying statues made of lead or huge quantities of rocks, in which case you are weird.
Don’t ask me how this is related to the topic
Add customizable pre-orders and cheaper shipping in bulk together and it doesn’t take a greedy little bastard to figure out the ultimate secret (or what used to be anyway) of (pre-)ordering stuff from Neowing: keep adding new unreleased items to the order so as to delay its shipping and accumulate more items! You could always cancel the pre-orders later if you didn’t want them any more, as long as it was still before the release date. How deliciously convenient.
That was how I ended up with orders worth 30,000 yen. I added the items bit by bit over a period of more than six months. The shipping ended up being a lot cheaper (again, it’s all relative…) and all was good with the world.
And the good days looked like they were going to last forever (or at least until Haruhi gives up on our world)… until Neowing ran out of storage space for all the items they had to hold on hand due to pending orders. I guess I wasn’t the only one doing this…
Now, any orders older than 2 months will be automatically forced to ship. Unreleased items belonging in the same order also must not have release dates that are more than 2 months apart. Due to these policy changes, my future orders will have to be shipped separately. I think I’m going to have to downgrade to Registered Air Mail from now on…
Yet another brilliant plan foiled by the powers that be.
September 4th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
My sympathies. At least I know now not to use that once-brilliant strategy. ;)
September 4th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
You mean they stupidly rented a warehouse to store orders that have already arrived? They were silly before.
September 4th, 2006 at 10:05 pm
lol, anyways, good luck with future imports ;)
September 4th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
I think it’s not an evil trick, but people were probably doing that too much like you said, and being in Japan and all, there’s no space.
September 4th, 2006 at 11:47 pm
The point is… Sachiko ftw.
September 4th, 2006 at 11:52 pm
Start working and you will never need to bother youself with such calculations. Lol.
September 4th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
I don’t think so. In fact I would probably be more concerned about my money if I worked for it… D:
September 5th, 2006 at 12:02 am
LoL! What a flop. So get a job and screw those. I only order stuffs online IF it cant be obtain locally. =)
September 5th, 2006 at 1:34 am
Wow I’m surprised they actually can keep track with all the pending orders they have. Well I’m sure the plan of ordering and canceling still works…just the time period of it is shorten to a period of two months until they force ship. Well best of luck with your orders :D
September 5th, 2006 at 1:57 am
I always use EMS and my wallet cries. It’s nice to recieve my package in three days though. O_o’
September 5th, 2006 at 9:56 am
Even nicer for Singapore because EMS is overnight for us. D:
September 5th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
You know the old saying… “If you play with fire, you’re going to get burned.”
September 6th, 2006 at 7:01 am
Well sometimes you don’t get burned, and you get a nice roast instead. Two months sucks, but it’s better than no bundling at all.