I could go on and on about buyee. It's the aftermarket. You're buying directly from people living in Japan and also some businesses. And like any community it has its share of weird things too.
What initially threw me off were the choppers. These are people who will buy a kit and then resell its runners. They'll "chop up" kits for parts and sell them for $5-10 each. On one hand they're offering a valuable service; replacement parts, which is especially important for out of print kits. But on the other hand these parts clog up the search results. So if using buyee one of the first things that should be learned is how to filter searches.
The easiest way to do that is to just list by price because naturally a kit is going to be more expensive than a part. Or just adding -パーツ to the search to exclude them outright.
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Next up are the completed kits. People will fully assemble and paint kits and put them up for sale, but it ends up being sad for everyone involved. It's just unprofitable because plamo are meant to be time sinks.
So we'll have a skilled builder put in 30 to 40 hours on a single figure and the results are often awesome, but even at a couple hundred dollars the entire project is a loss. A working adult can make $600-800 a week working, which is significantly higher than what you can get selling completed figures.
So it's cool to be able to buy people's customs but they can't keep making them without losing money.
Like this custom Tamamo is badass and $320, but if you divide that amount by an hourly rate ($15/hr) it would have had to be completed in less than 22 hours to be profitable. Yeah, that's not happening. There's just too much detail in its paint job and the amount of custom parts used.
https://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/t1116206048In this case you are buying a man's wife. I bet his other bitches don't even get highlights.
