Pricing Japanese stock for overseas buyers

The question, and the honest answer

People ask whether we cover ebay.co.jp. We do not, and neither does anyone else, because there is nothing there to cover. eBay runs no domestic Japanese marketplace. ebay.co.jp is an export front door for Japanese sellers reaching international buyers. We tested it rather than assuming: the same query returns a full page against the UK marketplace and zero rows against the Japanese one, every time.

That sounds like a gap. It is not. Japanese goods are sold by Japanese sellers to overseas buyers on eBay US, and eBay US sold data is what we return. If the question is what a Japanese item fetches abroad, you are already looking at the right dataset.

Why this is a real market

eBay's own August 2026 report on used goods in Japan states that 73% of Japanese eBay sellers sold non-new goods in 2025, that the number of Japanese sellers offering them grew at a 19% compound annual rate from 2023 to 2025, and that they reached 211 markets. The report argues directly that sellers need a clearer view of which products are valued, where, and at what price points, so that market feedback can inform sourcing and pricing decisions back in Japan.

Japan's domestic reuse market was around 3.3 trillion yen in 2024, and government policy targets roughly 4.6 trillion by 2030. The buying side of that market, the shops paying cash over the counter, has to answer one question on every item: what is this worth. For a great many categories the best answer is an overseas one.

The categories that travel

Japanese domestic stock that reliably commands overseas demand includes compact and film cameras and lenses, fishing reels and rods, retro consoles and boxed games, trading cards, watches, musical instruments and hi-fi. Model names often differ by region, which matters when you search: a Canon IXY in Japan is an ELPH in the US and an IXUS in Europe, and the sold history lives under the name the overseas buyer typed.

Japanese language titles are well represented in the data, because exporters list in Japanese and in English. The lang=ja filter narrows a search to listings whose titles name Japanese, which is the right tool for Japanese card sets and model numbers.

What makes the number right

Two things. Depth, because a used item's value is a curve and not a point, and we return up to 1,095 days per search against the roughly 90 days a public page shows. And the real accepted price on a negotiated sale, which matters more here than almost anywhere: the public sold page shows the asking price on a Best Offer sale, and across 5,859 matched sales we measured it reading high 99.0% of the time, by a median of 14.9%. Pay a counter price built on that and the margin was never there.

curl -G https://api.compsapi.com/v1/sold \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "q=charizard psa 10" \
  --data-urlencode "days=1095" \
  --data-urlencode "best_offer=1"

What we do not do

We do not cover Yahoo Auctions Japan or Mercari Japan. Domestic Japanese resale is a genuinely different market with different sources, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. If your question is a domestic Japanese price, we are the wrong tool. If it is what your stock is worth to a buyer overseas, we are the right one.

日本語の概要はこちら。