HLJ Shipping Information

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Orders are automatically shipped from HobbyLink Japan when any one of the three conditions below applies:

All items on any of your individual orders are in stock

You request shipment of available items

You have an order that is over two months old and some items are available

An order is one or more items grouped together with a single unique order identification number.

Unless one of these conditions is met, the available items from your orders will stay in our warehouse. You can use our Account Maintenance System to track the status of your orders with us, and make a decision at any time about whether you want to request a partial shipment or not.

How much will shipping cost?

We will confirm the final shipping costs for your order after we have shipped it to you. However, it's very easy to estimate your costs beforehand from the information on our web site. Almost every item in our online catalog has a shipping cost estimate displayed at the top of its catalog page along with size and weight data.

The SAL rate shown is the estimated cost to ship the item via postal service "Surface Air Lift" small packet rates to countries in North America, Europe, Oceania, Central America and the Middle East. Customers in Asia should expect to pay about 20% less than this figure. Customers in South America and Africa should expect to pay about 20% more. A complete table of SAL rates is posted below. Also note that:

Some physically larger items and valuable orders (15,000 yen or more) may be shipped by EMS even if you request SAL shipping.
Taiwan, South Korea, Venezuela, Brunei, Jordan and some other nations don't offer SAL service. Shipments to these countries are by Air Mail or EMS.
SAL shipping is unfortunately not trackable.

The EMS rate shown is the estimated cost to ship the item via postal service EMS International Express mail to countries in North and Central America, the Middle East and Oceania. Customers in Europe should expect to pay about 15% more than the figure shown. Customers in Asia should expect to pay about 25% less. Customers in South America and Africa should expect to pay about 65% more. A complete table of EMS shipping rates can be found below. Shipments by EMS can be tracked on the Japanese post offices' web site.

Please keep in mind that the costs shown are the estimates to ship this item alone. If your shipment contains more than one item, the total cost for shipping will typically be 20-40% less than the sum of the individual items' shipping estimates. Also remember that shipping estimates include the weight of the shipping box and packing materials, so they're based on a weight higher than that of the item alone.

If you happen to live in Japan, we will ship your order using the domestic post office "Yu-Pack" parcel service. Up to 2kg, the cost is 600 - 1,000 yen, with next-day delivery if you're in the Kanto area. Packages too big to ship by Yu-Pack are shipped by Sagawa Kyubin, or some other domestic parcel service.

Additional information for customers outside the USA

Shipping by EMS Express Mail is also available. Just check the appropriate box on the order form when you place your order. Costs are generally 1.5 to 2.0 times the cost of SAL. Delivery is usually within one week of shipment.
Some countries don't offer SAL service. Korea, Taiwan, Venezuela and most countries in Africa are among these. For such shipments, we must use Air Mail, which costs about 80% more than SAL.
We ship valuable orders by registered mail or EMS. If the total cost of your order is more than 15,000 yen, we may ship it by registered mail or decide to upgrade your shipping to EMS (even if you requested SAL shipping) depending on the size of the order so that it can be tracked if there is a delivery problem.