Amazon.com

Does anybody have any experience purchasing merchandise from an American site and having shipped into Japan? (ie. Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, etc.)

I was wonder what the Japanese import duty is on these products. I purchased about $350 worth of textbooks and I'm a bit concerned whether or not I'll be charged up the as* with import duties. In some places, I saw that because the US and JPN are in the WTO, import duties are waived, in other places, I saw that only imports less than 10,000 yen are import-free.

Thanks for your help!

I order English books and CDs from Amazon Japan
(www.amazon.co.jp)- have you checked whether the book/ item you are looking for is available there? (You can select English on the site.) If your order is over 1500 the postage is free. If you haven't already, check there before you cough up the shipping costs for postage from America.

I saw somewhere that books are duty-free but I can't find the site again.
You could order from the Japanese Amazon.com site but I'm sure you've already seen that the prices are higher.

Thanks for your help! Unfortunately, I had to make my purchase at amazon.com this time because amazon.co.jp's selection is a little out of date when it comes to study materials.

Anyhow, I guess I'll just be waiting to see whether or not I get hit by import duties.

Thanks!

When I ordered a large amount of books from Amazon.com to Czech Republic ($369.65), I haven't paid any import duty, BUT I had to pay 9% VAT (including postage fee). I don't know about Japan though, just sharing my experience.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Yeah, luckily it doesn't seem like we have anything like VAT here in Japan but I sure wouldn't be surprised to be hit by a bill of some kind...

And also just as an aside, shipping was only $8 so wayyyy cheaper than I expected.

Another place you could try is Kinokuniya bookweb. I have bought new/used books from bookweb which was cheaper than amazon.com/uk/jp. But you need to have Japanese skills. Tel. 044-874-9653

I practically live on Amazon.com. I've bought huge volumes of hundreds of $$ and never paid a cent tax on arrival.

I don't think tax kicks in until you get well into the high hundreds of $$$.

They do have a new system of super fast mailing, though, and you pay a bit extra for that - a few $$ on the Amazon side, but still Japan side is zero.