Stop Paying Proxy Fees: How to Translate Japanese Shopping Apps on iPhone

You’re paying Buyee $15 per item because you can’t read Japanese.

That sounds harsh, but it’s basically true. Proxy buying services like Buyee, FromJapan, and Zenmarket exist partly for shipping — Japan doesn’t ship everything internationally — but a huge part of what you’re paying for is someone who can read the listings for you. Browse on your behalf. Bid on your behalf. Message sellers on your behalf. Because everything is in Japanese and you can’t do it yourself.

The fees add up fast. Buyee charges 300-500 yen per item, 1,000 yen for consolidation, 1,500 yen for repacking, then international shipping on top. Reddit is full of people doing the math and not liking the answer: “Total hidden charges + shipping are higher than the total cost of the items.” FromJapan users are saying “their new fees are horrid.” By the time you add proxy fees, consolidation, repacking, and shipping, you’re paying 30-100% on top of the item price.

Buyee did $302 million in revenue in 2025 across 4.5 million users. That’s a lot of money flowing to a middleman — and the language barrier is a primary reason why.

Why Japanese Shopping Apps Are Especially Hard

Most foreign shopping apps have at least some English. Taobao is Chinese-only, but you can muddle through with image search and prices in numerals. Japanese shopping apps are a different kind of hard.

The problem is kanji. Item condition labels like 美品 (excellent condition), 未開封 (sealed/unopened), ジャンク (junk), and 動作確認済 (tested working) are critical information that even intermediate Japanese learners struggle to read. Shipping terms like 送料込み (shipping included) versus 着払い (buyer pays shipping) can mean a $30 difference on your order. And none of this text is selectable — you can’t long-press it and hit “Translate.”

On desktop, Chrome’s built-in page translator handles this decently. But if you’re browsing on your iPhone — which most people are, especially for apps like Mercari that are mobile-first — you’re stuck with the screenshot-to-Google-Lens loop. Screenshot, switch apps, import, wait, read, go back, forget what you were looking at, repeat.

For every single listing. In a catalog of 75 million items.

The Platforms and Their Problems

Here’s the landscape of Japanese shopping that international buyers are dealing with:

Mercari Japan

The largest flea market app in Japan. Mercari rolled out a partial English UI in November 2025, which sounds great until you realize it only translated the app’s navigation buttons and menus. The actual listings — titles, descriptions, condition notes, seller messages — are still in Japanese. Because sellers write them in Japanese. Phase 2 of their English rollout hasn’t shipped yet.

This is where most collectors find rare items at reasonable prices. A vintage Seiko that costs $800 from a US reseller might be 25,000 yen (~$165) on Mercari Japan. But you need to be able to read the condition description to know if it’s worth buying.

Yahoo Auctions Japan (Yahoo! フリマ)

75.5 million items listed. Japanese only. No English UI at all. You literally cannot use it without a proxy service or the ability to read Japanese — and to bid, most proxy services charge per-bid fees on top of everything else.

This is where the real deals are. Vintage electronics, retro games, collectible figures, rare vinyl — all at Japanese domestic prices. But the entire bidding interface, item descriptions, seller questions, and payment flow are in Japanese.

Surugaya

The go-to for anime figures, games, and media. They added English checkout recently, which helps with the payment step. But every listing — the title, condition grade, description, and shipping details — is still Japanese. And they don’t ship internationally, so you need a forwarding service anyway. At least being able to read the listings yourself means you know exactly what you’re forwarding.

Rakuten

Rakuten has an English “Global Market” site, but it’s a curated subset with markup. The real Rakuten — with the deep discounts, the point system bonuses, and the full seller catalog — is the Japanese site. Same story: navigation is learnable, but product details are all in Japanese.

The Collector Specialty Sites

• Mandarake — anime, manga, and collectible toys. They have an English site, but the Japanese site has significantly more inventory and sometimes lower prices
• Rakuma — Rakuten’s flea market app. Japanese only, but growing fast
• Booth — doujinshi and indie goods. Japanese only
• Disk Union — vinyl records, especially City Pop and Japanese jazz pressings that Western collectors are paying premium for
• BookOff / HardOff — secondhand everything, from books to audio equipment to vintage cameras

Every single one of these has better prices than what you’ll find on English-language export sites like AmiAmi or CDJapan. The tradeoff is that they’re in Japanese.

The Collector Communities Feeling This

This isn’t a niche problem. On Reddit alone:

• r/Watches (3.3M members) — vintage Seiko and JDM-exclusive models that are “almost unfindable outside the Japanese market”
• r/MangaCollectors (1.9M) — raw manga, first editions, out-of-print volumes
• r/retrogaming (900K+) — Japanese retro games are significantly cheaper bought domestically in Japan
• r/AnimeFigures (480K) — retired and rare figures from Mercari, Mandarake, Surugaya
• r/rawdenim (180K+) — Japanese denim brands where, as one Heddels guide puts it, “you click a random link and end up with Japanese characters all over your screen”
• r/VinylCollectors (42K) — City Pop and Japanese jazz pressings have exploded in value, and the best prices are on Disk Union and Yahoo Auctions

Many of these collectors already have Japanese forwarding addresses set up. Some have friends in Japan who can receive packages. The shipping problem is solved. The reading problem isn’t.

Translating Japanese Shopping Apps in Real Time

PiP Screen Translate puts a floating translation overlay on top of whatever app you’re using on iPhone. It reads the Japanese text on screen using OCR and shows the English (or any language) translation in a picture-in-picture window — without leaving the shopping app.

Here’s what that looks like browsing Mercari Japan:

You open PiP Screen Translate, start a session, then switch to Mercari (or Yahoo Auctions, or Surugaya, or whatever). The overlay floats on top and translates as you browse. Scroll through listings, tap into details, check seller profiles — the translation follows you.

What it translates well

Product titles and descriptions — The core information you need. What the item is, what condition it’s in, what’s included.

Condition labels — 美品, 未開封, やや傷あり (minor scratches), 目立った傷や汚れなし (no noticeable scratches or stains). These are the kanji that matter most when you’re deciding whether to buy, and they translate cleanly.

Shipping terms — 送料込み vs 着払い. The overlay catches these so you know upfront whether shipping is included.

Seller descriptions and notes — The paragraph of Japanese text where sellers describe flaws, included accessories, and purchase history. This is where proxy services actually earn their fee — and where the overlay replaces them.

Navigation and buttons — Purchase flow, payment options, size selectors, search filters.

What it struggles with

I’m not going to pretend it’s perfect.

Text in product photos — If the seller took a photo of a label or spec sheet and uploaded it as an image, the overlay is reading your screen, not the image-within-the-image. Zooming in helps sometimes, but small text in photos is hit or miss.

Very dense listing pages — Some Yahoo Auctions sellers write novels in their descriptions with tiny text. The overlay gets the gist but may miss some details in walls of small kanji.

Live chat with sellers — If you need to message a seller to ask a question, the overlay can help you read their reply, but you’ll still need to write your message in Japanese. Google Translate or ChatGPT can help compose the message; PiP handles reading the response.

Handwritten kanji — Some vintage sellers photograph handwritten notes. OCR struggles with handwriting in any language, and Japanese handwriting is especially variable.

For browsing, comparing, and deciding whether to buy — which is 90% of the shopping process — it works. For the final 10% where you need exact specifications or want to verify a subtle condition detail, you can always screenshot that one thing and use Google Lens for a careful look.

Which Platforms This Works Best For

Mercari Japan — best fit. Mobile-first app, large readable text, standardized condition labels. The overlay handles it well. This is probably where you’ll use it most.

Yahoo Auctions Japan — great for browsing. Item listings, bid history, seller ratings all translate cleanly. Browsing and evaluating items is the hard part; the actual bidding mechanics are simple enough with numbers.

Surugaya — works well for catalog browsing. Clean layout, consistent formatting. Good for scanning through their massive figure and game inventory to find specific items before committing to a purchase.

Rakuten — solid for product pages. The Japanese Rakuten site is cluttered (famously so), but product titles, prices, point bonuses, and shipping details all come through.

Mandarake — useful for the Japanese-only inventory. Their English site covers maybe 60% of their stock. The other 40% is on the Japanese site, and the overlay lets you access it.

You Might Not Need a Proxy Anymore

Not every collector needs one. If your problem is purely shipping — you need someone physically in Japan to receive and forward packages — then yes, a forwarding service is necessary. But that’s a $5-10 flat fee, not a percentage-based proxy markup.

The expensive part of proxy buying has always been the human in the middle: someone to read listings, evaluate conditions, communicate with sellers, and make purchasing decisions on your behalf. If you can read the listings yourself — even through a translation overlay — you can cut out most of that cost.

Japan’s secondhand market is worth 3.5 trillion yen (~$23 billion). Mercari’s cross-border sales have grown 15x in three years. More international buyers are accessing this market every year, and the ones paying the least are the ones who’ve figured out how to navigate it directly.

A translation overlay isn’t as good as actually reading Japanese. But it’s a lot cheaper than paying someone else to read it for you.

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PiP Screen Translate is available on the App Store. Free trial, no account needed.