AmiAmi - Shop Review

I was was starting to think that maybe it would be completely unnecessary to do reviews for what I think are totally gold-standard shops like Amiami or Mandarake but after spending some time on r/animefigures lately I've come to realize that there are a lot of people who just don't know where to buy figures from. I see far too many posts of people buying from weird shops and then complaining that they got stiffed with no product, bad customer service, items shipping way after release date, etc. So, it seems that yes indeed it is necessary to tell people what's what and where is good to buy anime figures. That said, if I could only buy figures from one shop for the rest of my time in this hobby that shop would without a doubt be AmiAmi.

I come here every day just to see the updated items!

What makes AmiAmi so special?

If I had to pick one thing that makes AmiAmi the best shop for anime figures, I would have to say that it's the pre-owned figure section.  This section is even better now since they updated their site a year or two ago to allow better filtering of search and browsing results. It's really easy to see whether figures from a particular manufacturer, series, or even character are in stock.  This makes looking for older figures in the pre-owned section a breeze.  

Ah, the things I am looking for.

Once you've found the figure, you can buy it with confidence knowing that AmiAmi has applied a very rigid grading system to their items. A grade figures are sealed, so basically new. B grade figures have been opened and are supposed to have some signs of wear, but my experience with them has basically been that they appear to be in 'like-new' condition, meaning they were taken out of the package at some point but suffered no damage or markings while they were out.  C grade figures are damaged and the damage is usually indicated in the listing - I've never bought one of these.  They also grade the box condition if this is something you care about but to me this just means a potential extra discount on new figures.

Is that it? 

That's not it. On top of having an amazing pre-owned section that's easy to search and full of figures to browse through and potentially purchase, AmiAmi has a very consistent selling process. Whenever your items are ready to ship they'll send you a payment request with different shipping options for your order, and once you've paid it they'll ship out the next day. It's like this every time with no problems whatsoever. This isn't like Mandarake where some employee needs to go look in the physical retail store and grab the item off the shelf, which sometimes takes days. If you order an item from the site, it's yours. 

On top of that, they also have a very simple interface for combining orders, and you can even combine pre-owned items onto your monthly order, which is actually very dangerous to one's wallet and can lead to some impulse shopping when you are ordering some small anime goods like a card box or mug or something and start to think that maybe a swimsuit figure could get into that box and still be small enough for registered SAL shipping. 

These two are extremely cute.

Lastly, and this is dumb but I gotta mention it, AmiAmi always includes a cute postcard with their mascots on it. These are adorable and I have them all around the house. They seem to change every month. 

I've heard they'll ban you for cancelling pre-orders, what's up with that?

So AmiAmi does not, in principle, accept order cancellations. However, if you use the order cancellation request now built into the website or send them an inquiry with your order cancellation request they will do it for you.  As I mentioned in my TOM review, there is a very useful way to use this system to take advantage of TOM's great but unpredictable points promotions and sales.  That said, they will eventually issue a warning to you or even ban your account. I managed to request 33 cancellations over a roughly 6 year period before I hit this point, but I've also spent thousands of dollars on the website over the years so it's hard to tell what exactly will set them off. Also, all they did was issue me a warning that my account was "not in very good standing" so it's not like I can't order from there anymore or anything. I just won't be cancelling any more orders. 

If you're going to cancel orders, just keep the following in mind. NEVER cancel orders for pre-owned items. Just don't do it! As soon as you order that item it becomes unavailable to other customers so I can imagine that canceling the order will really piss them off. Also, if you're going to cancel items, cancel them as far in advance as possible. They mention this specifically on their cancellation request page so it seems like the safe way to go. 

Are there any problems with AmiAmi?

Amiami won't have shop exclusives a lot of the time, though they are starting to pick them up on occasion. That means if you want stuff from Native, for example, you'll need to order through Native directly or from another site like Nippon-Yasan. These items will show up in the pre-owned section later, but you can't buy them new directly from AmiAmi.

AmiAmi prices aren't always the best. They usually have a decent discount for pre-orders, but compared to the prices you can get through TOM or some other sites during promotions (which AmiAmi basically never has) you'll never get the lowest price on a new item through AmiAmi. 

Shipping can be a expensive. Again, compared to sites like TOM or even Amazon.co.jp, EMS shipping can get very expensive once you exceed the weight limit for registered SAL shipping. There's no avoiding this, but that's the case with many Japanese sites. 

In summary...

AmiAmi is the figure site by which all other figure sites should be judged. It your metaphorical chunk of platinum-irridium alloy buried in a French vault by which you will know if any other figure site measures up. If you're new to the hobby, start here. If you've been in the hobby a while and haven't ordered from AmiAmi before, what are you doing even?