Selling brand-new, unopened electronics in Japan

Three things make this market bigger in Japan than almost anywhere else.

Point-based retail. Large Japanese retailers return 5–20% of a purchase as store points rather than discounting the price. Someone who buys to collect points ends up holding a sealed item they never intended to use. Selling it unopened is the normal way to convert that back into cash.

Gift culture. Seasonal gifting（お中元・お歳暮）and corporate gifts put a steady supply of sealed appliances and gadgets into households that did not choose them.

Licensing. Buying goods to resell requires an antique dealer licence（古物商許可）, issued by the prefectural police. That barrier keeps the buying side to registered businesses, which is why there are established shops with published price lists at all — and why those lists can be compared.

The result is an ordinary, legal, competitive market. On any given item several shops publish an offer, and the spread between them is often meaningful.

These are today's highest offers for sealed Apple products across the shops we track. "Shops compared" is how many of them currently publish a price for that exact item.

Cameras hold their value unusually well in this market. Japan is where several of these are made, the domestic buyer base is deep, and professional bodies and lenses are bought sealed for resale abroad.

This is the category where offers most often exceed the retail price, because supply is deliberately limited and demand is not. Limited editions in particular can sit far above what the console originally sold for.

Audio is the category where the gap between shops is widest in percentage terms. The same sealed pair of flagship headphones can differ by a fifth between the best and worst offer, because audio is resold through more varied channels than, say, phones.

Large appliances are the quiet half of this market. Unit prices are high, but so are shipping and storage, and several shops will not take anything that exceeds standard courier limits. If you are holding a sealed air conditioner or a vacuum, check whether the shop accepts oversized items before comparing offers — that answer changes your net more than the offer itself does.

The spread is not noise. Each shop is quoting against its own resale channel and its own stock position.

This is why a comparison exists at all. On a well-covered item the difference between the best and second-best offer is often small, but on thinly covered items — anything only two or three shops quote — it can be large. The number in the "Shops compared" column is the fastest way to tell which situation you are in.

Two forces move these prices, and they work in opposite directions.

A successor launching drops the previous model. This is the sharpest single move in the data, and it is announced in advance. If a replacement has been announced and you are holding the outgoing model sealed, that is the moment to decide.

Supply returning drops everything. An item that is hard to buy carries a premium purely because it is hard to buy. When stock returns to shelves the premium goes, often within days.

Seasonality matters less than either of those, with the exception of appliances, where air conditioners and similar move ahead of the season rather than during it.

It happens more often than people expect, and always for the same reason: the item is hard to buy at retail. Limited editions, allocation-restricted consoles, discontinued colours, and anything caught in a supply squeeze can all clear their original price.

The opposite is also true and worth saying plainly. For an ordinary item that anyone can walk in and buy today, the offer will be below retail, because the shop has to resell it and make a margin. Nobody pays you more than they can sell it for.

This is the single thing that decides which price you get, so it is worth being precise.

Powering a device on is usually enough to move it out of the first two categories. For anything with an account-based setup — phones, tablets, computers — completing the initial setup ties the device to an account and it stops being sellable as new.

Almost all of these shops operate by mail（宅配買取）rather than over a counter.

Being direct about the limits, because they are real.

You need an address in Japan and a Japanese bank account. Shops ship nothing overseas and transfer to nothing overseas. You also need photo identification — a residence card, driving licence, My Number card or passport. This is not the shop being cautious; the Antique Dealings Act requires the buyer to verify and record who they bought from, on every transaction.

So this market is open to residents of Japan, including foreign residents. It is not usable from abroad. If you are outside Japan and researching what Japanese prices look like, the numbers on this page are still real — they are just not something you can transact against remotely.