>>10963441Main three sites I’d recommend and their pros and cons
AmiAmi:
- Great site with awesome prices.
- Pain in the butt when it comes to pre-ordering certain items; i.e., Robot Damashii and Transformers.
- No up front pay for pre-orders, and can combine shipping on multiple items to a certain extent.
- Great packaging which guarantees that the boxes inside do not get damaged during transit.
- I still have not experience their customer service and the products that I ordered so far came in great condition (knock on wood), but I hear that their customer service tends to be iffy.
- Can cancel pre-orders, but do it too often and you get black listed.
HLJ:
- Good prices but not as good as AmiAmi's.
- At least items are not sold out as fast as AmiAmi.
- Packaging in kind of iffy, but I noticed that my items come in better condition when I use FedEx.
- Pile of loot style and more accurate shipping calculator are big improvements.
- No upfront pay for pre-orders, and you can cancel your pre-order at any time.
- Best customer service ever. They help me have two SHE Gaikings that came defective, had the factory repair them, shipped them back to me at no additional cost, and they even refunded the money that I spent to ship the items back to them.
BBTS:
- Best customer experience, period.
- Although prices for exclusives and other Japanese items are quite expensive (blame this on the weak Dollar), they do have competive prices on big ticket items like the DX SOC Mazinger Z and the Encore Fort Max.
- They have decent sales from time to time.
- Still is the place to have that particular item that is sold out every where else. And tends to be cheaper than eBay.
- The originators of the pile of loot system.
- Can cancel pre-orders at any time.
- Each toy is meticulously packed with bubble wrap and in a nice heavy duty cardboard box.
I usually go with BBTS since money hasn’t been as much of an issue lately, but I can understand how some still go with HLJ and amiami.
