Comment by bemmu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bemmu | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Candy Japan guy here. Japan Post announced that there will be price increases, which seemed to more than double the shipping cost. Even if I could ship (haven't checked lately if they opened yet or not), the service would need to change. Probably going from twice a month to once a month while still costing the same, so not sure how attractive that would be to subscribers.

While the site was down I started working on some other projects which are looking promising, so I'm dragging my feet a little bit about restarting it (I already refunded everyone's candy balances in case I never restart). Since I spent 10 years curating candy I also got a little bit tired towards the end to be honest.

I should probably make some use of the organic traffic it's getting though. I've actually had more traffic from Google after I could no longer ship. Thinking of selling one-time boxes on the site instead of subscriptions, as I could then spend the time I used to spend on curation on new projects instead.

FWIW I don't want candy twice a month but I would be interested in something that came every six months or yearly. Twice a month just seems like a _lot_ of candy.

Have you considered setting up a distributor/forwarder in the US? The only relatively fast services I know of operating from Japan to the US right now (DHL + FedEx Priority Intl) are expensive for sure, but the prices become more economically feasible at larger parcel sizes and weights. Shipping one large batch to the US and then splitting packages there might be an option. (Japan Post Seamail is also an option (as the only available offering right now from JP), but currently takes 2-3 months to arrive).

I import a good number of items from Japan as a small business. Happy to chat more about the little context I have about both JP->US shipping and US domestic.

> Japan Post announced that there will be price increases, which seemed to more than double the shipping cost.

That seems sort of fair, given the situation.

I'm curious - do you think Japan Post subsidized foreign package shipment fees (before the pandemic)?

It's dramatically more expensive to ship stuff from Sweden to Japan, than in the opposite direction, as an example.

I think the JP to US prices increased specifically, and more than any other price increases Japan post might have made. Japan Post removed the US from an existing shipping zone and marked it as its own shipping zone with higher prices. I have a statement from a US shipping provider (PirateShip) about the increase of outgoing USPS shipping prices that likely also explains the increase of incoming international mail as well:

> In late 2019, the US government threatened to pull out of the "Universal Postal Union," which is the international treaty that sets what postal services pay each other to trade mail & packages. This started a negotiation where the USA required the ability to "self-declare" the shipping rates it would charge other countries, instead of them being set by the treaty. This resulted in other countries "self-declaring" rates, too... all of which made international shipping through USPS way more expensive than it already was.

So, it's directly caused by china using the USPS as e-commerce driver ( subsidized shipping by the western world), which caused the US to back out.

It's an old union and it didn't take e-commerce into account. For better or worse, something had to change.

One time boxes sounds good to me. Being able to send someone a nice little present would be great.

There's a lot of anxiety for me surrounding monthly boxes.

Hearing this makes me sad. I had a subscription for maybe 9 months before everything shut down and I definitely miss it. It made my honeymoon in Japan more enjoyable, as we would try to find our favorite items from your boxes in convenience stores. I've tried other services, but frankly they're not good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com