Apart from a few handful of exceptions, I don't have much confidence with the Japanese sellers on eBay.
- They often have atrocious feedback.
- Use bad quality blurry low resolution photos (almost as if they imported them from Yahoo).
- You see the same items (whether it be music CDs, video games or guitars) with the same photos copy-pasted between multiple user IDs.
- They also often have multiple thousands of items at any given time so it is not likely you will be taken care of with a personalised customer service. According to some of the buyer feedback, some sellers have zero communication at all (probably because they can't understand English so it's better to just ignore buyer emails).
- The condition descriptions are vague and the bare minimum at best (e.g. This is a used item and has scratches.) and incorrect at worst (e.g. just from the photos, I can tell those albums are not "like new"). I can understand for low value items but I would expect at least a little bit of effort for the expensive items.
- The cherry on top is that the items are priced barely competitively at best or completely ridiculous at worst.
Also, these multiple thousands of items all are placed on different backgrounds and surfaces so I can only assume they don't actually personally have the items physically on hand and they're using a program or a bot or something to import these items from elsewhere. I can confirm that some are directly from Yahoo. So everything is just automated, the prices, the photos, the conditions etc. Just set and forget. As a seller, it might be a pretty good way to make money without putting in too much of your own time and effort, but as a buyer I would completely avoid due to a high chance of potential issues.
Now that I think about it, one may consider this to be basically the Japanese version of dropshipping?