To anyone considering proxy buying sites for keitai

Just wanted to toss this on here as far as my experience was concerned.

I'm based in the US and had been looking at keitai for a while, and while I know that a few scratches or physical imperfections won't ruin a phone I was really hoping to find one that was new/like new. Kyoex is crazy expensive (a new 903KC is ~$350), and even y2kphones is pricier than what I wanted to spend, so I decided to try my luck with a proxy shipper.

After reading a bunch of reviews and seeing how the various sites operate, I decided to go through Buyee. I wound up settling on a "like new" (never used, but open box) Kyocera A203KC from Mercari dot jp. It's possible that I could have found something cheaper in the auctions, but I didn't want to go through the bidding process, and this was a guarantee.

Before shipping, the phone was ¥12,800 ($89). It took two days for the phone to reach the Buyee warehouse, and I went with Buyee Air shipping for ¥3,600 ($25) to get it from Japan to the US.

Buyee Air wound up using UPS as their shipping service and my package was picked up in Japan at 1:02PM JST on 06/04/25 (11:02PM CST on 06/03/25), and was delivered to me at 6:15PM CST today, 06/05/25. It took them less than 48 hours to get it door to door, which is frankly impressive as hell.

The process was extremely easy, and I snagged what is essentially a brand new unlocked A203KC for about $115.

10/10, would recommend Buyee for proxy shipping for anyone interested in grabbing a keitai for themselves. Now to dig into the guide that u/ashenweaver put together to get it all set up and optimized.

u/Ashenweaver's Kyocera Keitai Guide