Picked up a lot of about 50 OCG cards off yahoo auction japan for around 8,000 yen. Mostly older secret rares with a couple ghost rares mixed in. Pretty happy with the actual haul, the lot was solid and a couple of the cards are ones I'd been hunting for a while.
The shipping side is what's killing me though. My proxy quoted almost $30 for international shipping on top of the service fee and domestic shipping from the seller to their warehouse. Once you add it all up the total creeps close to what I'd pay just buying the same cards individually off TCGPlayer. Kinda defeats the whole point of buying from japan.
Consolidating multiple auction wins helps spread the shipping cost but I don't always have several orders running at the same time. For a one-off lot the overhead is rough. Looked at a few different services and Onemall had lower listed rates for lighter packages but haven't tested it yet.
Packaging is another wildcard. Yahoo auction sellers are all over the place. Some use toploaders and hard cases, others literally just slide everything into a padded envelope with no protection. Had cards show up with dented corners from bad seller packing and no proxy can really fix that.
Right now the fees make it hard to justify grabbing lots off yahoo auctions unless the cards in the lot are stuff you genuinely can't find anywhere else.