That’s what I can say about Good Smile Company’s first attempt at selling their goods overseas. The first product available from Good Smile Company was a Miku Nendoroid which part of the cost of the figure was going to charity for the Japanese Earthquake back in March. Shipping from Japan is costly at times usually around 20-25 US Dollars (2000 Yen) since everything ships out of there EMS. The Miku Nendoroid has been out of print for a bit and usually goes for a pretty jacked up price in most conventions. This particular one comes with extra items like a flag of support for Japan. The figure itself costs about 3000 yen (35-40 US Dollars) and when stacked with the shipping is about 5000 yen (60-65 dollars). Only about 1000 yen goes to charity (about 10-15 US dollars) from the sale. Pre-orders occurred earlier in the and were suppose to ship July.
Here is where things get odd. AX in California took place which featured the first US concert for Hatsune Miku which I really wish I could have gone to. There they sold the same Miku Nendoroid for about $36-38 which was far cheaper then then one we ordered from the company. They sold out fast from what my friend told me. Not long after that we got a notice from Good Smile that they shipped out which meant they would show up a with the week. Well that week came and gone and the status sat there in prep for some time on the order. Fast forward to last week and i was getting tired of worrying that it got lost in the mail. There is no tracking number for this order which is odd for an EMS shipment but I remembered that another company I order from has this issue where EMS shipments don’t have tracking numbers they can give out. I contacted Good Smile through their contact form to find out what was going on and when was it shipped so I can figured out roughly when it should arrived. That was last Friday.
Tuesday morning, I received a badly translated notice from Good Smile regarding my order. Shipment of all products were sent via Surface Parcel. In other words standard slow mail service. I would be fine with this if A. they didn’t charge us for EMS shipping up front and B. they didn’t tell us till a month after they sent the shipping notice there was this change and no option to adjust it. For most shipments via Surface Parcel it’ll take 3 months to arrive in the states with 1-2 months varying inf your closer to Hong Kong which is apparently the point of origin.
What gets me is Surface Parcel is the cheapest method of shipping but very very slow and high risk of damage to packages. That being said, what happens to the extra not used for EMS shipping? I sure hope to god GSC isn’t going to pocket the money and it sure as hell had better not have paid for something else. I highly doubt they’ll refund the extra they charged us for but it would be a nice gesture to this total screw up. Hell, give us the option to decide to put the extra not used to the charity they were donating to from the sales.
Even after a few days I’m still miffed over this whole thing. I think I’ll stick with ordering from AmiAmi in the future…
I’m not alone in this feeling, quite a lot of people have been upset by this too:
http://www.figure.fm/post/en/30418/Nendoroid+Hatsune+Miku+Support+Delay.html
Update: Late Wednesday night I got an email from Good Smile Company with an apology regarding the shipping fiasco that occurred. They refunded the shipping cost that was meant for EMS due to the mistake in shipping. Any damaged Nendoroids will get replaced due to shipping via surface parcel.
