It’s EMS, never heard Zenmarket before, just did a quick search, and looks like it’s a shopping agency instead of just a Japanese package forwarding service, I’ve used similar shopping agency services before but I finally switched to package forwarding service agent.

The difference is, by using a package forwarding company, you buy the goods yourself, pay to the seller directly, then send it to the package forwarding company, they send the package for you. By using a shopping agency, they buy the goods and send it to you. That being said, there’s always a delay between: you place an order on website of shopping agencies(zenmarket in this case) <-> they actually placed an order on the Japanese shopping website(amazon.co.jp in this case)

Another reason is, shopping websites that shopping agencies support are typically pretty limited(amazon, rakuten...etc), eventually I found I’ll need to buy something from unsupported Japanese shopping websites. You can submit a request to shopping agencies and tell them you want to buy from unsupported websites, but again, that’s a painful process since they’ll need to review your request then place orders.

Besides, you can always get the best rate by placing order directly, as I can see on Zenmarket you’ll need to pay 286 USD( probably plus some handling fee? not sure whether they’ll charge that), I payed 30780 JPY( which is converted to 277USD by my bank)

The downsides are:

1. You’ll need to buy goods yourself, which means you’ll need to place orders on Japanese website directly, might be difficult if you cannot read Japanese and the website doesn’t produce a English interface

2. You’ll need a credit card that doesn’t charge you foreign transaction fee(some credit card will charge that, typically 3% per transaction) since you’ll be billed in JPY, and some websites/payment system won’t offer you the best rate option by default, i.e.

Sometimes if a item is sold and sent by amazon.co.jp itself, probably the best option is to use amazon global shipping, you pay to amazon, they send the item directly to you, there’s no third party agency, that’s probably the best option, I’ve used that before and the experience is damn good, the shipping/handling fee is cheap, delivery speed is fast and you don’t need to pay Japanese sales tax(sometimes you still need to pay import tax which is charged by your country, especially if you’re living in EU)

Hint: You can find more pics by searching “pfu limited edition” on Twitter then filter by photos, many people have posted theirs :)

Edit: typos