>>6807961>> shf and any import brands are only sold in LCS stores for absurd markups, as if they bought the figs regular price from Amiami and adjusted the price to make a profit.Actually, shops _are_ better off ordering from Japanese retail than distributors.
Normally I'd qualify that with "if you're ordering small amounts." All things equal, Japanese shipping stacks basically linearly. 1 item, $10 shipping, 2 items, $20 shipping, 10 items, $90 shipping. So you sort of get killed on large orders. But...
On the Japanese side, they started cracking down on quantities. Getting 2 or 3 of anything, especially SHF, is getting tough. So shipping fees on a case-sized order are now moot.
On the US side, the distributors, Entertainment Earth especially, are assholes about shipping. EE sells by the unit but won't reveal case sizes. What they list as a "case" is a subset of an actual case. If you order anything but a multiple of a real case (24-48-72 for most SHFs), they're likely to split it across multiple shipments (bloating shipping costs).
Even if you do order a solid case, they're not smart enough to separate out all the full case orders beforehand. So if the client before you ordered 26, the monkey on the line will either stuff the case of 22 with 2 slots worth of newspaper and mail 2 from the next case separately or cram 2 from another case in your case of 22 and slap a $2 handling fee on it. That's IF they don't look at 2 and 22 as non-case orders and split them across 6 or 7 shipments. You get caught in this situation if your order falls near a Bandai partial shipment boundary.
Total shitshow. Shipping would be $20 for a case of 24 but usually ends up in the $50-$60 range. Oh, and the last few years, base cost is usually above Japanese retail anyway. It's not worth the hassle, just to get stuff banged up and late, to say nothing of cries for a reissue because you're $3 over a $55 sold-out web exclusive that people dragged their feet on.
