Best Place In Eu To Buy Sailor Seiboku Or Souboku (50Ml, New Bottle)?

[mana]

Hi, I was wondering which place would offer the cheapest rates (with combined S&H included) for the said inks in the new (square) bottles? Currently found one place that sells Souboku (Writing Desk in UK) but even that was a preorder thingy...

Of course there is always the option of ordering directly from Japan, any recommendations on that too? Found a few places on ebay but that was about it...

 

Destination for said inks would be Finland.

Thanks,
mana

[Bexinthecity247]

I should learn to read - I posted you the link to the WD before I saw you'd already looked.

Sorry!

Not sure if it's cheap but this seller is in Japan https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/352298230764?chn=ps

Edited August 17, 2018 by Bexinthecity247

[aurore]

The cheapest SEI-boku is here: https://www.ebay.com/itm/263782517456

As for SOU-boku it is a bit more tricky https://www.ebay.com/itm/263782517545 (technically over 22EUR limit...).

 

Both are the cheapest, rakuten isn't cheaper unfortunately (the prices are but the shipping kills it).

Keep in mind that as poor-EU-souls we have a 22EUR tax free import limit (unless a seller is an open-minded), exceeding this limit could make buying ink from Japan very close to the European prices

Edited August 17, 2018 by aurore

[KellyMcJ]

I buy from JetPens all the time but I don't know about shipping to Finland. I'm in the US.

[Chrissy]

La Couronne de Comte has Sei-boku and there is 20% off this weekend with code SUMMERSALE201820 but I don't know how that compares with other store prices.

[aurore]

La Couronne de Comte has Sei-boku and there is 20% off this weekend with code SUMMERSALE201820 but I don't know how that compares with other store prices.

 

20% off... damn

[A Smug Dill]

La Couronne de Comte has Sei-boku

 

 

No guarantee that its stock is in the new retail packaging with the square bottles, though, going by the product image on the web site.

 

 

20% off... damn

 

 

Hmmm, what about it? €22 less 20% is €17.60, plus shipping of €4.95 unless you're placing an order of €100 or more after discounts on item prices. Is your ‘damn’ an indication that you feel you're missing out on a good offer (as detailed above), or that it's nowhere near enough of a discount to grab your interest?

 

Of course there is always the option of ordering directly from Japan, any recommendations on that too?

 

 

I just buy on Rakuten Global Market. Unless there's a platform-wide promotion, Japanese sellers on it tend to just charge you (fairly and honestly) whatever Japanese Post charges them for international shipping by EMS, which is calculated by weight in very finely graduated increments.

 

Being based in Australia, I'm used to seeing prices north of A$25 a bottle from local retailers for almost all brands of Japanese, European and American (as in Noodler's) inks except maybe old-school staples like Parker Quink; some local bricks-and-mortar retailers (e.g. Kinokuniya) used to ask A$42 or even A$49.95 for a 50ml bottle of Pilot Iroshizuku or Sailor Nano. Paying a marginal shipping cost of ¥180 per 100g, or roughly A$5 for each bottle, is tolerable when the savings in directly ordering from Japan is two- or three-fold of that.

 

I have five bottles of Sailor Nano pigment ink in the new packaging arriving from Japan (hopefully) next week. Not including shipping, they work out to roughly A$17.50 (or €11.10) a bottle. It's part of a A$600 order (but there was still no offer of free international shipping), so the marginal shipping cost per bottle is a little lower that what I stated before; and, with the application of enough promotional coupons, discounts and reward points from previous purchases, the shipping charges for the entire order were effectively cancelled out.

 

The heart wants what the heart wants. I fully appreciate wanting to pay the lowest prices available to oneself, but if the lowest price of something is €30 a bottle (among a sea of €33, €37 or even €45 for the same thing, say), then one ought to be happy with achieving that lowest price, irrespective of what lower price anyone else elsewhere in the world gets away with paying.

 

Now that Engeika is shut, I don't think there are many other direct import-from-Japan channels for me to explore, other than to look on eBay and Amazon Australia (which is another can of worms with recent changes) for comparison from time to time.

[A Smug Dill]

Well, I finally received my order of pens and bottled inks from YouStyle on Rakuten, shipped from Japan to Australia.

 

As a line item, it charged me ¥3,769 (€29.03) for shipping on the order – consisting of twelve fountain pens, eight converters, five 50ml bottles of ink, and fifteen ‘consumable’ pigment-ink brush pens that are not refillable. On the official Japan Post EMS Dispatch Note, the postage paid is shown as ¥5,900 (€45.45), and so the merchant wore the difference, even though the way Rakuten works is that the international customer places the order for the items, and the merchant will work out shipping charges after the order is received and accepted (i.e. checked for stock availability, etc.) and then inform the customer, so it had every opportunity to determine the actual postage when packing the order and bill me for the full amount.

 

I certainly don't regret buying directly from this retailer in Japan, in spite of the significant shipping charges.

[aurore]

A Smug Dill, definitely a nice feedback. Japanese sellers are great. Just for your info though, for us in the E.U. importing is rather uneasy, whatever exceeds the total value of 22 EUR (shipping costs are also a part of this value) is subjected to appx. 20% VAT and if the value is over 150 EUR also is subjected to customs duty.

Edited August 29, 2018 by aurore

[A Smug Dill]

@aurore, fortunately the O.P. was only asking for the lowest-total-expense channel available to him/her for acquiring the product, without setting some arbitrary price criteria; but realistically, nobody can ever have perfect market (or operational) intelligence, and crowd-sourcing of information tends to only elicit data for this retail channel or that one in dribs and drabs. I guess it's up to mana to set a time limit on the research period, collate and review the information collected once decision time is at hand, and work out which channel is cheapest (and whether he/she wants to proceed with a purchase at that point, I suppose).

 

I'm somewhat impetuous and frivolous as a consumer myself, and tend to just bite the bullet and order something I want once I see it below some arbitrary cost-of-acquisition threshold, instead of insisting on finding the absolute cheapest way that may rely on information I don't already have. Check eBay, check Amazon Australia (now that Amazon US and UK, etc. won't deliver to Australia any more), check Rakuten, and a couple of Australia retailers that primarily sell online, and I'm pretty much ready to make a decision. Occasionally I'll miss out on once-in-a-blue-moon opportunities to stack special discounts and free shipping promotions (e.g. from Cult Pens) to get something marginally more cheaply shipped from somewhere in the EU, but I just can't bring myself to play a long waiting game to see what happens during Black Friday sales or close to Christmas and so on.

[lapis]

Dill, I like your attitude. Reminds me of my own (although I'm not down there in your vicinity).

[aurore]

@A Smug Dill
Look, it's that easy: if one wants many bottles, rakuten is the cheapest option despite VAT; if one wants a single bottle, the ebay links above are the best.

 

Is rakuten the best place to buy a single bottle cheaply? Nope, sorry.

[A Smug Dill]

@aurore, there is no need for any apology, even if it was only rhetorical.

 

As a shopper, I love a bargain – to the point of doing silly things that are not ultimately in my best interests (e.g. spend more in total on an order just to qualify for free shipping) to feel as if I scored. However, I just don't share some people's obsession with cheap as a criterion.

 

If going cheap was my priority as a consumer, I wouldn't be using Sailor inks to write, or writing with fountain pens that cost north of two hundred, five hundred or even a thousand dollars apiece. A Zebra Sarasa gel-ink pen would tick ‘all’ the boxes: quick-drying, waterproof but nonetheless vivid colours; writes smoothly to the point of gliding on the page; and made in Japan to boot, while still far cheaper than even a Platinum Preppy.

 

There is no ‘best place to buy’ a new Lexus vehicle cheaply, so equally I don't believe there is a ‘best place to buy’ Sailor pigment ink cheaply outside Japan. I also don't believe avoiding GST/VAT/custom duties is a respectable endeavour; I do it, too, but I don't pretend that is ‘the right thing’ to do, or that I ‘have a right’ to acquire stuff for my personal and discretionary consumption without the government wanting or being able to tax me.

 

So, back to the O.P.'s question, I still believe it's a matter of finding what's the lowest total-cost-of-acquisition channel available to him/her, without at all trying to avoid attracting shipping charges or custom duties. Whether that lowest total-cost-of-acquisition is something that he/she will ultimately balk at is irrelevant; it's not our business whether his/her desire for the product will ultimately win out.

[aurore]

@A Smug Dill, either I agree with you in general or not, the thread was started with:

Hi, I was wondering which place would offer the cheapest rates (with combined S&H included) for the said inks in the new (square) bottles?

[mana]

For those in the EU, La Couronne Du Comte has a -20% FPD sale (code: FPD2018), just pulled the trigger on a couple of bottles of Souboku, Can't wait... <3