Everyone Wants to Make a Good Deal.
In Japan, just one product might have a variety of choices and it makes people dazzling sometimes. Bad manufacturers also try to take advantage of that confused situation and to scam consumers by sending an unacceptable bad quality product or after-sale service.
As a smart consumer, to avoid the above bad situation, what can we do? Between, will you do a price comparison before purchase?
If you do, is that you will go shopping around at different scale of shopping malls for research like I did previously? or you will do a price comparison on different online markets such as Amazon or Rakuten?
If you have done the above that means you are attempting to be a smart consumer and the following article is right for your reading because I am going to share you a popular website name ‘Kakaku（価格)’ which this is a famous website in Japan, the Japanese meaning of the website is PRICE, Japanese people often use this website for price comparison and product review before they make their purchases.
How to use Kakaku (価格)?
1. Use Keyword search
Simply input the keyword of your product in the search bar of the homepage, then you can click for the result. （see below picture）OR,
2. You can also set your searching preferences
After a set of your searching preferences (see the above picture), click the ‘search’ button, the relevant results will be listed out accordingly. A circled part on the left hand, is a ‘price range’ setting, you can also set your budget ranges for yourself.
In addition, if you have preferences on some online markets, you can set from the part of the available markets. All of them are on the left that help to get an effective search result for the product. On the right hand side, there is a circled ‘sort by’ column. You can choose to read by a set price or launch date.
I guess the searching idea of the format for the website is just similar to the popular style we usually use. It should be easy to learn how to use except the language of Japanese that can be easily solved by using some e-translation tools nowadays.
3. The selling status of your wanting goods
You can see the hit rate of your desired product.
After selecting your preferences and the relevant results will be listed out.
In the attached picture (on the right hand side the above), there are different sections on top, this is a clear picture for you to know your goods in terms of prices, stock availability, buy-in shops availability, product reviews, etc. many useful columns that were bold in red.
When you click in your selected column on top, the detail information will be listed out, for example the price column that I have circled on left, a competitive list will be shown for the prices of each product model, the colour availability for the product; the availability to buy it online or at a specific shop only; free delivery or not; the location of the manufacturer and the payment methods, etc.. You can also check out more details by clicking into your selected manufacturer’s homepage（ショップの売り場へ行く）which is on the right part that I circled.
4. Comments/Reviews on your wanting product
Another important column that I want to share with you is the product review page (see the pictures below). You should read through all the related useful contents in order to know the users’ comments on the manufacturer and whether the quality of the product is good or not.
Lastly, No Rush Buy
Never do a rush buy, I usually put the product into the favourite basket first hand and come back later to see if they have updated reviews or price promotions further.
This article was first published on 20.1.2021
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