Otaku Shopping Guide

Editorial Policy

Editorial Policy

Last updated: July 12, 2026

Accuracy and freshness

  • Every article displays a “Last updated” date. Articles about fees, shipping or tariffs also state when the figures were verified against official sources.
  • Fee and tariff information is re-checked when providers announce changes, and on a scheduled review cycle. When rules are in flux (as US tariffs have been since 2025), we say what is confirmed, what is proposed, and what is unknown — we do not present guesses as facts.
  • Price references come from the Japanese market: Suruga-ya and Mercari sold listings, manufacturer MSRPs, and official announcements. When we quote a marketplace price, we note the date we saw it.

Corrections

If we got something wrong, we fix the article, note the correction, and update the “Last updated” date. Found an error? Email hello@otakushoppingguide.com — corrections are the fastest way to make this site better.

Testing and real purchases

We regularly place real orders — our own money, ordinary accounts, no disclosed press treatment — through the services we cover, and photograph the results. Where a claim comes from our own order, we say so. Where it comes from aggregate user reports (Trustpilot, collector forums), we say that instead, and link the source.

Affiliate disclosure

Some links are affiliate links: if you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Our rules:

  1. Recommendations are decided before monetization. The use-case verdicts (which service for which order type) come from the fee math and user-report data, not from commission rates.
  2. We recommend services with no affiliate program whenever they’re the right answer — and several of our frequent recommendations pay us nothing.
  3. Affiliate links are marked with sponsored link attributes, and this disclosure appears on every page that contains them.

AI assistance

Drafting and research on this site are AI-assisted and human-reviewed. Every fee figure, date and claim in a published article is verified against primary sources before publication, and the real-purchase photography and Japan-side market checks are done by a human in Japan. We hold this site to the same standard we’d demand from any guide: if it isn’t verified, it doesn’t ship.

What we don’t cover

  • Adult-only doujin works and age-restricted products.
  • Methods that violate a platform’s terms of service, evade customs duties, or misdeclare package values. If a “trick” requires lying to customs, it’s not a trick — it’s a seizure risk, and we won’t publish it.