How to Buy Secret Honey with Buyee – Buy from mercari.jp outside of Japan

Hello everyone 🙂 I recently put up a poll on my Instagram account asking my followers if they were interested in a “How to buy Secret Honey with Buyee” post. And almost 90 % said, that it would be helpful. It seems that many people are afraid of the service because they think it’s complicated and difficult or that they will get scammed. But it isn’t at all. So here we are 🙂 If you are interested in all the ways to buy Secret Honey that I tested over the years, you can find everything in my post “How to buy Secret Honey“.

What I will not show you for data protection reasons is how to create an account. But I guess, I don’t have to, it works like any other account you set up. And that’s easy 😀 Now let’s start with the tutorial. I have many, many screenshots for you guys 😀

Find Pieces on Mercari

The marketplace you mostly want to shop for Secret Honey dresses is mercari.jp. We do that over a third party service called Buyee. You can directly access Buyee over buyee.jp. When you are on Buyee on your desktop, you have a tab called mercari. If you are on your phone (like most of us, which is why I’ll explain the steps with screenshots from my phone for the rest of this post) you have to click on the tab “Shopping” and then choose “mercari”.

Then, we need the right search terms. The katakana for Secret Honey are these, just copy them from this post: シークレットハニー

Then you can add Disney for example (ディズニー) or the name of any princess you like. If you cannot write in katakana, I recommend you the website yourkatakana.com. You can enter the name of the princess there and it gives you the right characters (most of the time). For some princesses like Aurora and Snow White, the movie title works much better. For other princesses like Jasmine, the western letters work better. It’s trial and error.

You can save search terms for later if you like:

As soon as you tap into the search bar later, the saved search terms appear. I have the problem, that I can’t really scroll down this list, so I only have as many saved as I have space on my screen for:

If you know how a piece was called (for example Anna Dolman Cardigan), you can also search specifically for the name to narrow your search down even more. For that, simply google “Dolman katakana”, “Cardigan katakana” and so on, google should give you the right characters that you can then enter into the search bar. For our example, I was simply looking up “Secret Honey Disney” (in katakana, obviously).

When you enter the search term, the listings are sorted by “New arrivals”. You can change that by clicking on the arrow next to “Sort by New arrivals”. I quite like searching for “low to high prices”. But be aware that you will only get “all” listings if you sort by “New arrival”. For some reason, there are less listings when you sort them by price.

Let’s say we are interested in this pretty tote bag with different princesses on it in black. I’m going to list some tipps, that might sound obvious to you, but I still want to mention them, just in case 🙂 So here is our listing:

Let’s Evaluate, Wether an Article is Safe to Buy or not

The first thing I do is look at the pictures. If there is no picture of the actual item, bad sign. If the pictures are cut out, the tag is not visible (if the description mentioned it is tagged) usw., bad sign. Most people take really good pictures, they normally point out stains, signs of use etc. in photos as well as the description. This listing for example has a close up of the handles that are a bit aged.

Then I look at the description of the item. Buyee automatically translates into different languages which is nice. Here is the description for this item. As you can read, they take their descriptions very seriously, I really like that.

The last thing I do is having a look at the ratings that the seller got. This seller has many ratings and 5 stars overall. And I am sure the shield and thumbs up mean something good as well, but I can’t explain that to you, I don’t know… Sorry 😛

So. For this listing, considering the pictures, the description and the feedback the seller got, I would buy it if you don’t mind the handles being a bit wrinkly 🙂

For costumes, you may have to dig a little deeper if you want an original dress. Some factories started producing remakes of Secret Honey dresses. These remakes are different from the original dress (different fabric or even different size). If you want to dive deeper into the topic, here is a blogpost I wrote specifically on the topic of Secret Honey remakes. 

Buy the Article

You have two options to buy. Either save the article to your basket and buy it later, or buy right now. The buttons are pretty “bamm in your face”, but here is a print screen anyway:

For this example, we buy the article right away, so we click on “Proceed to order page”. On the order page, there’s two things. First is the “plan” you can select. I always use the free plan and I never had any problems. I’m a yolo type of girl and if something comes destroyed or it is fake or anything, I’ll take it, it’s part of the game. But if you want to be on the secure side, you can chose one of their plans, some come with insurance in case the article is fake/destroyed or anything. But since I don’t use these plans, I cannot really explain you what the different levels mean for you.

Next I want to point out that you will have to pay an additional 300 yen for the “Buyee Service Fee”. The fee is always 300 yen regardless of the price of the item.

I always pay with Paypal. You can link Paypal, a credit card and they also take Alipay.

Then you scroll all the way down and click on the Paypal button:

And that is it. You will get two confirmation emails from Buyee. The first one will arrive right away, it is a confirmation that they have received your order. The second one confirms, that they have actually bought the article. Normally, it comes together with the first email. But there are sellers, that wish you to comment or contact them before buying. Buyee will do this for you. In this case, it obviously takes longer until Buyee can actually buy your article.

Waiting Until Your Articles are in Storage

As soon as you bought them, you can find your articles under the “Shopping” tab under “Orders”.

In this view you can see, if the seller has shipped your article and wether it has arrived in Buyee’s warhouse or not. But don’t worry, Buyee also sends you an email as soon as an article reached the warehouse, there is no need to check constantly:

Buyee stores your items for free for 30 days. After those 30 days, every new day costs you 100 yen (or 200, I’m not sure, last time they charged me 100, but I always thought it’s 200… So I can’t say for sure). But keep in mind, that they will only keep your items for an additional 60 days, after that, they dispose of them. If you want to know, how many days you have left of free storage, go to the “Package Information” tab and chose “In Storage” beneath:

Then you get a list of all your articles and the amount of days of free storage you have left for them. They are listed from “most days” to “least days”, so to know when you need to ship your parcel, scroll all the way down to the last item.

What is interesting here is, that you can ask for photos of the item. They will unwrap your item and take pics of it. I did this once, but they don’t really open it up all the way, so you only see the folded item. I don’t remember the cost, but that additional fee will be added to the shipping fee once you ship your item. As soon as they have taken the photos (they will not notify you via email about this, you have to go and look for them), click the icon next to “Request photos”.

You can also get rid of your item here, should you wish to do that (we all know we won’t ever destroy a Secret Honey dress, don’t we?).

If you bought all the articles you want and all of them arrived in storage, it is time for shipping 🙂

Ship your Secret Honey Items

For this part, we still operate in “Package Information” and “In Storage”.

Since I most of the time wait until I have several items that I want, I will show you how you ship several articles combined. If you want to ship only one, simply click on the orange button beneath it and follow the instructions:

But we want several items. First, tick the little box at the top left for every article you want to send to your address. If you tick one item, a bar appears at the top of your screen. As long as you only tick one item, you can only add protective packaging (tied to a fee ;)). As soon as you ticked several items, you can chose the option “Add Package Consolidation” on the right side. Click on it, when you added all items you want to ship:

You will be led onto another page, where all your items are listed. You can again add protective packaging if you want. For me that was never necessary, I even bought glasses once and the seller from Japan packaged them well, Buyee simply didn’t unpack them and everything was fine :).

Scroll down and click onto the button “Apply for Package Consolidation”. As soon, as you applied for package consolidation, the counting down of the days of free storage freezes. So if it takes Buyee two days to consolidate your items but you only had one day of free storage left, it is no problem. As soon as Buyee informs you of the shipping cost and everything, the counting down proceeds (so in our example you would have to pay shipping within a day, if you don’t want to pay for storage).

Once you clicked that button, you cannot undo it. So only click, if you are sure you want to ship your items. Now we have to wait for Buyee to get back to us with the shipping cost. You will get an email notification. Here’s what it looks like:

After it has been consolidated, you can go back to “Package information” an “In storage” and click on “Select shipping method”.

I always use EMS, I have never tried anything else. Buyee gives you some warnings and information about some of the shipping methods though. But we will chose EMS now, it is selected by default and also Buyee’s recommended way of shipping:

Now scroll further down and click the button “Finalize Change”.

Now you are directed to the payment page. I always use Paypal if you have added your Paypal account this option will be selected by default. Now click “Checkout” and Buyee and Paypal will finalize the payment.

You will be led to this page, where you can go and see your shipped items. The parcel is not yet shipped though, Buyee will do that within the next 1 to 2 days.

You will get an email confirmation as soon as your parcel is shipped with the tracking number (if you have chosen EMS). The tracking number never worked on the Swiss site for me, only on the Japanese post site though. Here’s the email you get:

As soon as your parcel is shipped, you can find it under “Packet Information” and “Delivery”.

There you can find your tracking number on the top right:

And that is it 🙂 Now you only need to wait until your parcel arrives. One thing to note is that Buyee always marks items at the price you paid for them. So you will in most cases have to pay customs once the parcel arrives in your country. Keep that in mind and always calculate an extra bit of money into your plans. My parcel arrived after about a week, as always. I paid 32 CHF in customs for a value of around 200 CHF (shipping costs are also added on top of the value of the items). But customs vary depending on your country, so this might not be helpful to know. Here is what I got:

I am very happy with my purchases. All as described, all in good condition, all pretty <3

I hope this post helps you to buy your Secret Honey dresses with Buyee 🙂 I really like it, because you get good prices on your items if you hunt for them long enough. And apart from some really rare dresses (like the Merida Set) you can find almost every piece on Mercari and buy it with Buyee. But once you found a good listing, don’t wait too long 😉 They are gone pretty fast, if it’s a good deal. I missed a few items just because I was sleeping while they were put online ^^’.

Thanks a lot for reading and I see you in my next post 🙂

Love,
Ella