Yahoo! Auctions Japan (Yafuoku)

Yes, in Japan. Yahoo! JAPAN opened its auction service on 28 September 1999. On 27 March 2013 it made the nickname ヤフオク! (Yafuoku) its official name, and on 1 November 2023 it went back to Yahoo!オークション, which is why you will see both names. The Yahoo auction sites of other countries are a different story: the US and Canadian ones closed on 16 June 2007, Singapore's in 2008 and Hong Kong's in 2020, while Taiwan still runs its own.

So when people ask whether Yahoo Auctions still exists, the site they usually mean is the Japanese one. And if it will not open for you in Europe or the UK, that is not a closure: since 6 April 2022, Yahoo! JAPAN's services have been blocked in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom.

Many auctions have automatic extension, shown as 自動延長：あり in the item details. If the current price goes up in the last five minutes, the end time moves back five minutes, and this repeats as long as the price keeps rising; a bid that does not raise the price does not extend it.

On BuyHub you can filter by auction or fixed price, store or private seller, condition, price and free shipping, and sort by ending soon or most bids. Set an alarm on a lot from the results or by pasting its auctions.yahoo.co.jp link, and BuyHub warns you before the end, with the titles translated and the yen price shown in your currency.

Yahoo! Auctions Japan, known in the country as Yafuoku, has been running since 1999 and carries great weight in Japanese e-commerce. Bidding is the core of the site, though some sellers set a fixed price so the item can be bought outright. The sellers are individuals and small businesses from every corner of Japan, and each listing typically shows plenty of photos, a condition grade and the seller's feedback score: useful clues before bidding on a valuable item.

For collectors it is a goldmine: Famicom and Game Boy games, Pokémon items, figures, anime merchandise, vintage toys, trading cards and sealed boxes, plus releases that never left Japan. Listings are in Japanese and prices in yen. The site is not available from the EU or the UK, and sellers rarely ship abroad, so purchases from outside Japan usually go through Japanese intermediaries who place the bids and forward the parcel.