Thursday, March 15, 2012

How to Order from Tokyo Fashion


Notice 12/2015: I have not purchased from Tokyo Fashion since this was originally written and do not intend to do so in the future. Their website has since changed and I am unfamiliar with current procedures. As such, I am unable to answer email inquiries regarding the ordering process. This post will be left up only as a reference in case it is helpful.


Tokyo Fashion (東京著衣) is a popular Taiwanese brand founded by Mayuki Zhou in 2005. Along with its sister brands Mayuki and YOCO, Tokyo Fashion is one of the top Taiwanese webstores, and they have consistently good quality. Their styles often get copied by Chinese wholesalers, unfortunately, but if you want the real thing you can buy directly from them - they ship internationally, and the price works out to about the same as a wholesale site anyway.
You have to sign up with their system to order, but then you actually order by email. Even though they do have instructions on their site, only the general instructions are in English, and I thought that non-Chinese-speakers might have some difficulty navigating, so I made a quick guide.

Part I: Signing Up
Part II: Shopping
Part III: Placing an Order

Warning: image heavy! Click on the images to expand.

Please feel free to make suggestions for improving this guide! I am constantly revising it to help provide the most updated information.

Comments have been closed because most of them are questions about things that have already been explained. If you have any questions or suggestions, please email me.

Last revision: August 23, 2012


Part I: Signing Up

They have two versions of their webpage. The official one is www.mayuki.com.tw/, but the one you'll want to use for signing up for overseas orders is order.mayuki.com.tw/. As you can see, it has a nice Overseas Buyer page in the top right (which the main page doesn't have). The Overseas Buyer page is pretty self-explanatory. They have a link for estimating shipping, but it's in Chinese, so here's the cost table and calculator in English. They only ship EMS. You can check estimated shipping times here.

Click [註冊] (sign up) in the top right corner. They recommend using Internet Explorer. May not be necessary, but just a note. Their site occasionally in Chrome and Firefox, and IE might help.

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You'll be taken to a login page. click the button at the top right that says [新買家正入侵按我] (new buyer signup please click me).

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The next page gives you three signup options. Pick the last one (international buyers and other buyers).

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And now the signup form.

When you're creating your password, a little meter will pop up with color and words telling you how secure your password is. I think it has to be >50% for the system to accept your password.

The genders are [女] (female) and then [男] (male). On that same line, you enter your birth year, then pick month and day from the dropdown. Birth year is based on the Taiwanese Mingguo dating system, so subtract 1911 from your birth year (mine is 1991, so my Mingguo birth year is 80).

For the address, pick "台北市" (Taipei City) and "中正區" (Zhongzheng District) from the dropdown list and then type in your address in the blank space on the right. I used slash marks to split lines in my address: 1234 Street Name/ City, State Zip/ USA (actually, I forgot to put USA...I tried to add it later, but the "edit" page puts a character limit on how long your address can be. If you make this mistake, you can always email the customer service rep and tell her you messed up and ask her to edit your address for you. That's what I did.)

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Click submit and you will be taken to the terms and conditions page, which is way too long to screencap, but it can be put into Google translate pretty easily if you're curious.

Notable points:
4. The store has the right to set an upper limit (on pieces of a specific item ordered)
5. If you don't pay within 2 business days of making your order, the store reserves the right to cancel your order
8. Listed shipping rates are not for overseas
9. If you cancel an order after confirmation/payment, a 3% restocking fee will be charged.

The two buttons say:
[I agree (written consent)] [I don't agree]

You're done! The next page is also Google translate-able and pretty much says, you're done, don't forget to fill in your payment information. Then they give you some warnings about account security/Internet fraud.

The two buttons say:
[Yes, I want to do it now] [No, I want to do it next time]

It doesn't matter which you click - if you click "I want to do it now" you get taken to your member page, but you won't be able to fill in payment information until you place an order anyway. 

Part II: Shopping

Download the order form from the Overseas Buyer page. It translates most of the color names they use, and shows you how to tell what's in stock. The color list is rather long, so I haven't reproduced it here.


Green: Sold out
Red: limited quantity
Blue: in stock / Available
Purple: order in advance / restocking item

Note:  As far as I know their minimum order has been changed from 15 to 5. (Yay!) Remember that the shipping rate per item is better if you buy  more, though.

There are a couple of different ways to browse. The easiest is probably to use their main page (not the same one you used to sign up) and use the navigation bars along the top. The dropdown menus are Google Translate-able, but for your convenience, here's a translated screencap:
Once you pick a category, you can search by new arrivals (新品), popular items by number of sales (銷售), price (價格), and popular item by number of views/hits (點閱次數).

This is a little tricky if you don't know any Chinese, but it's doable with the help of machine translation.

You can check their measurements page to see what each measurement means. In general, their freesize tops fit up to 36C (34C for blouses), and freesize bottoms best fit a US size S. Some of their bottoms have S/M/L sizing, which corresponds roughly to US 2/4/6 (but check your own measurements to make sure).

Be sure to fill in the order form as shown by their examples: item number, your username, quantity, and then the item number for replacement (if your first choice is out of stock). You can add more lines to the table if you need to.

Please note: the item numbers are different for each color (and size if applicable). Be sure to pick the correct one! 

Part III: Placing an Order


Step 1. Double-check to make sure you have filled out the order form correctly, according to their example.

Step 2. Place the order via email.

The email address is mayuki0922@yahoo.com.tw. I used the subject line "國外訂購" (overseas order).

Emailing within the Taiwan workday is probably best for this, since you'll have to email at least twice (first to send order form, and then to confirm that your order has been entered correctly). I started around 10:30 am Taiwan time, and the whole thing took about an hour including email latency times o_O the response time is really fast!

Send the rep your filled-in form. She'll email you once she's entered it in the system (about 30 minutes).

Step 3. Check to make sure that everything has been entered correctly.

Click [會員中心] (member center, scroll back up to the first image in this guide if you need help finding it) and log in to your account. You'll have to confirm that you read the same Internet fraud warning as you did when you first signed up...you have to reconfirm this every time you log in -_-; Check the box and click the button.

You should see something like this. Click the blue text [按我付款] (press me to pay).

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The next page shows payment options. Click on the second-to-last one - this is for credit card payment.

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Now click on the pink text that says [我要刷卡] (I want to pay by credit card) next to the credit card symbols.

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You can't change anything after you pay, so check the details now. Also, orders can't be merged (so you can't confirm and then ask to add more items). I picked out 16 items, and my subtotal is 2936 NT.

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Step 4. Confirm your order.

Email the rep and say everything looks correct (or address any issues) and she'll calculate shipping for you. Once again, she replied really quickly (about 15 minutes for me).

I estimated that my package weight was going to be about 4000g, and it turned out to be 4005. If you're curious, these are the values I used to estimate:
Small items: 100g
T-shirts: 200g
Sweaters, Shorts, Skirts: 300g

Again, here's the cost table and calculator in English. Tokyo Fashion only ships EMS.

The customer service rep will email you the weight and shipping cost, as well as update the total in your account for you.

Step 5. Payment.

Head back to the payment page and click the button at the bottom right to confirm the order total. (I forgot to take a screencap of this, sorry! It'll look exactly like the previous image, but with shipping added in.)

You should end up at the following form. Only the fields marked with asterisks (*) and the two confirmation checkboxes at the bottom are required. The "invoice number" refers to the Government Unified Invoice number, which is used in Taiwan to track VAT/value-added tax and thus shouldn't be applicable.


The "submit" button at the bottom right will become clickable once all the required information is filled in. When you're ready, click here to move on. The long remarks here are Google-Translate-able I think, so I didn't bother translating them all.

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One last confirmation of your order total - mine's 4160 NT. Click on that center button.

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It'll take you to the payment page, which I didn't bother to screencap because it has English on it. Fill out your info and submit - the page might give you a error message, but don't freak out; it's the standard "this page may take some time, don't reload" warning. Acknowledge it and wait a couple of seconds.

And done! (the blue text says "you have online credit card success!")

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Your order should be shipped in 3-14 days, depending on the stocking status of the things you ordered. If everything you picked was in blue or red (in stock), it'll probably be less. Mine was shipped in 1 day.

For information on your order, check your account. Click on the button that says [訂單,包裹裡查]  (look at the sidebar in the picture above - it's the 4th one down). Once they ship your order, they'll post a tracking number there for you to use. They provide a link to the tracking site, but if you prefer, here's an English version of the tracking site.

I hope you have found this guide useful - happy shopping!