Japan → US eBay export profit, what it's really like

Corridor: JP → US eBay ／ focus: figures, soft-vinyl, tokusatsu ／ from matching items by hand

"Buy cheap on a Japanese marketplace, sell on US eBay, and you'll profit" — you hear it a lot. So what's it actually like? When you match domestic stock against what's selling overseas, one item at a time, by hand, the picture turns out a little different from what you'd expect. Keeping item names and sources to ourselves, here's the rough shape of what we found.

~1 in 10

items that still cleared a profit after fees and shipping (a feel, not a count)

mid four figures (¥)

typical net left on a profitable item — varies by item

20–30%

of the sale price that eBay fees + international shipping routinely eat

1. Black ink shows up on "maybe one in ten you dig into"

Matching items that caught our eye, what stays positive after eBay fees and international shipping is, very roughly, about one in ten. And the hit rate swings by several times depending on the niche. So you can't lump it together as "buy figures, sell on eBay" — where you dig changes the result entirely. Which veins run thick we share with early members (publish it and you just get front-run).

2. Even in the black, what's left is "mid-sized"

Even on items that stayed positive, the net left in hand tends to land in the mid four-figure yen range. This isn't a swing-for-the-fences game — it's the steady, mid-sized kind you stack by doing volume. Which is exactly why doing "hours of research per item" entirely yourself can stop being worth it on an hourly basis.

3. 20–30% of the sale price vanishes into fees and shipping

This is the biggest reason margins are thin. Even on an item that sells for tens of thousands of yen, once you add the final value fee, payment/FX, and international shipping, 20–30% of the sale price is gone and only a few thousand yen is left — routinely. Eyeballing the gap between cost and sale price and going "that's a ¥-something margin" lands you in the red. Export arbitrage only means anything once fees and shipping are in the math from the start.

4. The real bottleneck is "thin supply"

The most surprising part was here. The demand side (the fact it sells on eBay) is findable, yet not a single unit of the same item is sourceable domestically — that happens constantly. Knowing "what sells" is useless without "what you can buy." So the source of value isn't a flashy margin; it's finding and matching the one unit where demand and supply happen to line up, before it spoils.

This is a feel from doing it in the past. The figures are rounded ballparks and don't guarantee future profit. Prices, FX, fees, and stock move constantly. niixo doesn't say "you'll definitely earn." All it does is hand over one item it checked by hand, backed by a full refund if it can't be bought. If you resell repeatedly, a secondhand-dealer license may be required on the buyer side (see the basics guide).

What niixo is building

Take the "find, match, verify" work above, do it up front, and hand the result — a checked profit lead — to the one pro who needs it most, for one pro only, never duplicated. That's Niixo's sourcing research (preparing). The feel of each vein, and whatever we notice along the way, we'll keep writing up here.