Monday, March 10, 2014

Problem with FromJapan again

Do you see any change on my blog? Yup, I have removed the referral link to FromJapan proxy. It seems that everytime I purchase figurines through them, I always come across problems. Unfortunately, this time there was no way out as the damage was only discovered by me.

The items are Final Fantasy Chrome of Squall and Aerith. Squall arrived with his hand broken. The broken hand was glued and the dried up super glue is obvious. There are even fragments of the dried up super glue. Aerith came with her staff dislodged from the hole where it is supposed to stand and again, her bun was actually broken and is glued back.
The broken hand
The glue fragments and the glue around the broken hand
The orange super glue on the bun and the broken staff
These items are described as "good" and "beautiful". Apparently FromJapan also could not be bothered to check the condition of the item despite the obvious sound that there was something inside being detached. I asked them to contact the seller and the son of a bitch refused to give me refund or a partial refund. The argument is that he was selling used items and despite the damage, the items were still in "good" condition. What a fucked up excuse.

20000 JPY is not a small amount of money and I shall take a risk of getting banned by them. As I made the payment via Paypal, I decided to open a dispute on Paypal. I hope I can get a 50% refund as if I knew that these items were damaged, I would not even bother bidding for them and I don't think that they would be sold at such price. Not sure how the outcome will be. Sigh...

By the way there is an update from Square Enix regarding my damaged Final Fantasy Trading Arts Kai Mini: Ace. I informed them that I do have a Japan address and they are willing to send me a replacement. It will cost me $50 to ship it back via vPost. Holy shit man!! Bloody fuck to Amiami. Basically it cost me $80 just for a dumb shit toy...

With all these angst over buying toys online, perhaps it is time for me to stop somewhere :(

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello! Singaporean here.
I just found your blog today and it has been an interesting read, especially all the FF8 merchandise articles.

I actually saw your Guardian Forces Series listing on ebay (unfortunately I'm not interested, sorry!!) and then saw the same exact picture on a google image search which lead me to your blog.

I want to say that it's awesome knowing there are other big FF collectors out here in Singapore, that don't just collect FF7 stuff.

Knowing that someone else here actually went out to collect the old but awesome GF series is really impressive to me as that is a series I've wanted to collect ever since I was a kid.

I'll definitely be reading more of your FF merchandise posts!

If you're interested, I've been looking for an affordable clear Shiva and normal Odin with Sleipnir. Clear Bahamut would be amazing but I know that will cost me too much. Ultima Weapon is another story...lol

Anyway, please keep writing more articles, and take more pictures of your collections!

darkrose said...

Hi Jack :) Thanks for coming here.

Darn that you are not interested to buy the FF8 GF series!! Haha.. I actually still love them but I am thinking of selling them so that I can purchase the Japanese version that comes with Ragnarok pieces to assemble.

Unfortunately I don't have any of the clear GF. Just having the coloured version is already taking so much space (and money!) lol. Not a big fan of the monsters too so I also don't have Ultima Weapon, Omega Weapon, Iron Giant, and the skeleton monster that I forgot the name.

FF8 is my favourite as it is the first one that I played. Not a huge fan of 7 after comparing it with 8's graphics haha.. But gotta admit that FF VII AC Movie is epic.

Yup will try my best to post about vintage FF goodies that I have. My aim is to only take pictures and write on old items which are impossible to get information/picture even from google. Work is getting busier and I have backlogs of items to write about.

Gerald said...

Hey there, I know I am commenting on an old entry but I recently had some problems with FJ as well, and was curious to find out what the outcome was from your PayPal dispute.

On my end, I purchased a pretty expensive set of brakes at close to JPY 400,000, as they looked to be in relatively good condition on the pictures. I also paid more for FJ's Buyer Protection Plan (not sure if they offered that during 2014), where they would check the condition of the item and compare it against the seller's pictures upon arrival, and would provide a refund for any damages, etc. So my brakes arrived, they told me no problems, and I paid to have it shipped to me. When they arrived, there were deep, obvious scratches on one of the brake calipers. I raised this with them and after 1 week of deliberation they claimed it was "subtle damage" and would not cover it under the Buyer Protection Plan, not even a partial compensation. I'm definitely never using them again.

I am now raising a PayPal dispute as that seems to be my only remaining recourse. The courier, FedEx, has confirmed it will accept no liability as there was no damage to the outer packaging so this obviously happened during packing.

Could you share the outcome of your PayPal dispute? Thanks!

darkrose said...

Hi Gerald

Apologies for the late reply. For this one, I won the PayPal dispute. PayPal asked me to send back the items for full refund. I think PayPal also compensate the return shipping fee because I argued that FJ was clearly negligent to send me damaged items and it was not fair for me to fork out the return shipping.

I had another case that was ultimately resolved by credit card chargeback (I did not blog about it) so just keep that in mind as your last resort.

In the past, there was no FJ's Buyer Protection Plan. Looks like that it is only a gimmick for them to earn more money since they never have the intention to sort out any issues.