Volks.co.jp payment/billing

Thank you, Wolf I think i won't worry too much then.

 

They sent me a reply to my inquiry and said they are even increasing the number of staff and planning to ship all current orders till March the 2nd. I'm sure it's a lot of stress for them too...

 

It's my first time ordering from the Volks shop directly, usually i buy 2nd hand from Mandarake etc, so i hope everything goes well. I respect this company, really like their dolls and i would hate to be discouraged to use their official shop by this experience... But i think the excitement of having my first MDD home will make me forget all the anxiety ;D

 

Oh and answering your question, c4tbus, i sent them my paypal info to shopos@volks.co.jp email, but just in case, i also made an inquiry through the 'Contact us' form, and gave the paypal id there. Hope you get your invoice soon

 

Update (2nd March): they sent me shipping confirmation and tracking number! I'm so excited

They're clearly still working out the kinks. I got a shipping notice today for an order I placed from the English Volks International webshop on 2/5 for an item that was in-stock and not lottery.

 

I haven't been invoiced for this order.

 

I've let them know that I'm still waiting for an invoice, but it's been off-hours so they haven't seen my message.

I hope transactions will be dealt with faster in future. I placed my order on the 9th of Feb, got an email asking for my Paypal addy on the 16th, paid on the 18th and my order was shipped today.

I've generally preferred ordering from Volks Japan over Volks USA due to slightly better prices, similar shipping costs, and usually getting items as fast or faster.

 

But until they start accepting credit cards again and operating with a normal ordering system and not taking forever to process orders, I will only order from Volks USA.

Tried to order from them, and got this error:

 

"郵便番号は半角数字またはハイフン 8桁で入力してください。"

 

Problem is, my country postcode only have 5 digits, and apparently any changes to the address book doesn't show up in the order billing.

 

EDIT: Turns out I need to change the postcode in my web user info to "--------".

I'd like to know if anyone has attempted to pay for an order with card during checkout, and what happened when they did.

Last night I made an order - the first order I've made since the site changed. I saw the option to use a card, which surprised me because I thought that option wasnt available for overseas users. I figured they must have added it recently then and decided to pay by VISA - figuring if it wasnt allowed it wouldnt allow my non-japanese card. At first I got an error - in Japanese - but it was telling me to change my phone number and not my bank card. Note that you cant change your phone number anywhere in the ordering process, so I had to go into my user info and change it there. (It was still on my japanese phone number as I first made the account while I was in Japan, so I needed to change it regardless) After that I checked out again and it went through fine - it charged me 2000 yen for shipping, I paid by visa, I did the verified by visa thing and everything.

After that I got a confirmation email telling me that I'd eventually get a paypal invoice. 🤨 But...didn't I just pay? Checking my bank account online, the payment is still on 'pending', but thats normal. I'm not sure if the email was a mistake and is just something that is automatically sent, or if something glitched, or what. If I wasn't supposed to pay by card...why was it selectable as an option and why did the payment go through...? If it really was just a mistake and all overseas users get exactly the same email to confirm an order that mentions waiting for a paypal invoice regardless of whether one is coming or not...uh, they should look at changing that?

At first I thought maybe it let me pay by card because I made the account while I was in Japan. However I have changed my address and everything since then - I made an order about a month after I returned back to Australia too without issue. Also, if it thought I was still in Japan, it would have charged much less than 2000 yen for shipping. And, I dont know if this is true for the new site like it was for the old one, but when the site is in english you actually can not ship to a Japanese address, and when its Japanese you cannot ship outside Japan - despite it being the same site.

so...I really dont know whats going on here. I guess all I can really do is wait - and considering how long people seem to be having to wait for paypal invoices that gives me time to see what happens if/when the card payment clears. But...I'm very frustrated with exactly how bad the site is 3 months in. A company as fancy as Volks should not have a web store this unbelievably sloppy.

Edited March 19, 2019 by Monty

I've been curious about that too because on March 3rd they added this message in the news on the front page of the store: https://ec.volks.co.jp/topics_detail.html?info_id=22

Quote

Thank you very much for your support of VOLKS Web Site Store.

"New member registration" became possible from the website store!
Payment method "Credit card" "PayPal" is now available.

Like much of their somewhat broken English on the new store, that's about as clear as mud isn't it? Well they accept credit cards, but is it direct, still only via PayPal, what?

If paying by card is now available again to international users (so long as our phone numbers are entered properly in our profiles??), then that means its more likely that the email I got was a generic one for all order confirmations and they've forgotten to update the text. 
I will wait and see what happens, but I'm gonna be a little bewildered if I really do get a paypal invoice 😕

Edited March 19, 2019 by Monty

I actually paid for my last order with a credit card and it went through (actually received it), but yes, they still send a message saying it is a PayPal transaction.

I never got a PayPal invoice with mine.

11 minutes ago, kct said:

I actually paid for my last order with a credit card and it went through (actually received it), but yes, they still send a message saying it is a PayPal transaction.

I never got a PayPal invoice with mine.

Thanks for clarifying! I wont worry about it then, but yeesh they need to update the text in that email 😕 At least have 'IF you requested paypal payment, yada yada', and then it could still be a generic email.

I tried ordering a few items about a week ago paying with Paypal and was declined with the message being in Japanese. Haven't bothered since or tried with my card.

They really need to get this fixed. If it were just an informational site I wouldn't care, but it's not it's a store and we're handing over money. When your store doesn't work and errors come up in another language you can't understand people get worried they may have just lost money on a transaction that may or may not have gone through.

I even missed out on a DDP item because the store wouldn't take my money😩

1 hour ago, Aliens_Of_Gold said:

I tried ordering a few items about a week ago paying with Paypal and was declined with the message being in Japanese. Haven't bothered since or tried with my card.

They really need to get this fixed. If it were just an informational site I wouldn't care, but it's not it's a store and we're handing over money. When your store doesn't work and errors come up in another language you can't understand people get worried they may have just lost money on a transaction that may or may not have gone through.

I even missed out on a DDP item because the store wouldn't take my money😩

What was the error you encountered? Mine was the postcode not having 8 digits. What I did is to change the postcode in the online profile to "--------" and put the actual postcode in the address itself.

Volks seriously needs to fix their address book system, cause it seems like they do not refer to it when you're making orders.

so, just to pop back with a little update, even after all of the time volks waited on me because i didn’t send them my paypal correctly, the items i ordered were successfully reserved for over a month. so even if it takes a long time you still get your stuff.

fingers crossed for anyone waiting on issues to be resolved!

10 hours ago, kct said:

What was the error you encountered? Mine was the postcode not having 8 digits. What I did is to change the postcode in the online profile to "--------" and put the actual postcode in the address itself.

Volks seriously needs to fix their address book system, cause it seems like they do not refer to it when you're making orders.

It was just referring to my Paypal transaction being declined. That's what Google Translate told me anyway.

The address book stuff is just as bad. It's quite insistent that you put a prefecture down so I chose "other" that is displayed on the website as "その他離島など" apparently remote islands or something. A country selection list would be nice, but the old web store back at this point I think would be preferable, I knew that one worked.

The webstore is still a big ol' mess isn't it?

Since credit cards were being accepted again I just made an order. Because of posts here I knew to go put my zip code in the address field on the address page first. In my case, the rest of the stuff was filled in but that was missing and the postcode line said something like "if you can't put it here put it in the address field" which isn't very informative without knowing what others have experienced. Then when I fixed that I got a warning about how all marked fields are required. Since that is marked as well I thought it was going to force me to change my password again, but it was missing the male/female thing as that wasn't on the old site, I guess.

I checked the part for saved credit cards and there was nothing but it appears you can enter one. But then when I checked out it explicitly states that because cards are processed by a third party that no info is saved on the Volks site. Then under the credit card entry area is the question if you want to save the info, with the two answers in Japanese, which fortunately I could read enough of to know which is which. So it doesn't save it, but you can save it? Huh? There's also a cryptic option to make multiple payments? I'm sure most of us here can deal with this stuff, but it sure doesn't inspire much confidence and isn't very inviting to someone who might be ordering their first DD.

Like I said in some above, clear as mud.

Then the confirmation email I received says I paid via Paypal. All of this doesn't inspire much confidence that the website is properly set up to be secure either does it? And on that subject, they went through all this and required a password reset, but the rules for the passwords are still only 20 characters and only letters and numbers. Sigh.

An addendum to the above message that I forgot about even though I was very mad about it...

I was charged some kind of 5% handling/convenience fee on my order! I didn't use Paypal (though order confirmation claims I did) so why was I charged this? It just showed up in the final order confirmation, without any explanation.

@Monty, did you notice if you got that as well? There's no way to see it in looking back at the order, but the total amount listed in the confirmation email includes it, even though it's not listed as an entry.

Have you checked your invoice? This is what I had on my last order:

 

Is that the invoice that comes in the order? As I just ordered I don't have that yet. If I log into the website it just lists the items I ordered; it doesn't show a subtotal, shipping charge, or anything else. The confirmation email lists the items and an "item total" which includes that 752 yen fee but doesn't mention it. The order summary screen when I placed the order before confirmation is where I saw this enumerated along with 2000 yen for shipping. I should've done a printscreen on that if I'd known there would be no further record of anything.

That order confirmation claims I used Paypal which of course I did not. From what you said above I assume you got the same message. What I'm questioning now is if I made a mistake in ordering; the online form has the credit card stuff visible to fill in yet there is still a thing to check whether you are using Paypal or a card. I know I checked that but now I wonder if it got reset somehow and if that is why I got charged the fee?

I don't have much confidence in the website. I was on one of the pages when I was fixing the zip code that I couldn't cancel out of, so I hit back on the browser, and I got an error message in Firefox saying I was in offline mode--a message I have never seen before in all the years of using it.

This is really frustrating.

Edited March 23, 2019 by cfx

I had to request the invoice separately when customs decided to slap me with a 10% tax (unavoidable), so it's not issued unless you asked for it. And no, I've also paid with my credit card, including going through secure verification in order for the payment to be made, but I still received the confirmation e-mail saying I paid with PayPal. These are portions of the e-mail I received after payment was made:

It's like the entire payment system is acting up very weird for me. I haven't gone back to order anything else yet, but I'll be on the lookout for it.

Edited March 23, 2019 by kct

They're really inconsistent. You look like you got HTML email; mine was plain text and not formatted very well.

Anyway, you were charged the fee as well. Your two items 28000 + 780 total 28780 yen; 5% of that is 1439 yen which makes 30219 yen. Add the 50 yen insurance fee and you have 30269 as shown.

Hopefully this is a bug because they're still claiming we are paying with Paypal and they'll stop charging extra for using a credit card. If they don't, that probably wipes out any savings over ordering from Volks USA.

This is how the invoice that I got looked like (name, address and phone number removed):

As you can see it looks pretty normal, but it made no mention of PayPal no. used or terms of payment.

Ok now my head hurts.

The amounts on your invoice don't match anything from that email. I realize now that the prices in the emails don't include the Japanese consumption tax. I don't know now what the numbers showed when I got the order confirmation page on the website. What it shows me now in the order summary is also the prices without the tax.

On your printed invoice, if there's a fee it's just included with the shipping charge so it's impossible to tell.

It may be the total in the email is as bogus as the claim we used Paypal and has nothing to do with what we're actually being charged.

What I do remember is my shipping fee was supposed to be 2000 yen. So if I get a different number on the final invoice that will suggest there's a fee being included in that.

Whatever is going on, it's not a very professional way to do business.

 

AFAIK they have always added the handling/convenience fee.  Just remember they aren't from your country and do things differently.  All part of dealing internationally.

13 hours ago, sinclair said:

AFAIK they have always added the handling/convenience fee.

That's possible; I'll try to find one of my old invoices.

Update: I just looked at my order confirmations for previous orders; the old email format showed all charges. I have never been charged any kind of handling charge before this order.

13 hours ago, sinclair said:

Just remember they aren't from your country and do things differently.  All part of dealing internationally.

CDJapan, Amiami, HobbyLink Japan, HMV Japan, and Hobby Search don't charge handling fees; I'm sure there are many more that's just who I remember that I've dealt with. Jungle does (or did since they seem to be permanently offline) but they at least told you about it in their FAQ/ordering info. If Volks explains it anywhere, I haven't seen it, and given how cryptic and unfriendly the website is now I doubt it.

Edited March 24, 2019 by cfx
additional info

Well, those other sites you listed also cater to outside Japan groups while Volks doesn't.  I'll have to go check my old invoices, I also thought they had charged some extra fee, which is why some people only order form Volks USA as the items would be cheaper without that fee (Didn't Volks Int always list price of things as 'with or plus fee' or something like that?  If this is a new fee, then that is really lame on their part.).