Hahaha, this is great information anyways, thanks 
Ah, yeah. Always buy from Sahra whenever possible. Because the shipping rises in tiers, it’s very possible to get a good or bad deal on shipping. 10 books may cost the same to ship as 16 books, and you can’t know if you’re leaving box space on the table unless you add items and check shipping.
And also, I’d say the shipping generally doesn’t become worthwhile until you get to around 15+ books. Usually when I put in an order, it breaks down to ~￥6000 for the books and ~￥4000 for shipping.
I’ve been looking for a place to buy the entire set of Initial D in Japanese. Unfortunately it seems like Mandarake doesn’t have it 
Might have to resort to Fleabay. To be fair, I’ve gotten good stuff on Ebay before, so it’s not really that objectionable.
It might not be as convenient as getting the whole thing already bundled together, but it does look like Mandarake has most, if not all of Initial D in stock issue-by-issue from Sahra.
Do you have a link? Maybe I was brain dead while browsing.
Sure. Unless I’m mistaking a spinoff/reboot for the original, this should be #1: Kodansha - Young Magazine KC Shuichi Shigeno initials D 1 | Mandarake Online Shop
And you can search the others by seaching “頭文字d” under books, with the number of the volume you want afterwards. So 頭文字d2 for the second volume.
Never trust the english title to get you what you want on mandarake. It is, at its core, still a japanese website.
Silly me, I should have considered this.
Most of the manga have english titles listed on them. They are all also mostly just the japanese title put through machine translation.
I myself have bought such timeless classics as “matter was slime After”, and " Yakumo-san want to bait pickled".
I put in another order that was a bit more expensive to see if they would actually hit me with customs. Soon after the order DHL sent me an email telling me to pay 23.87 EUR on an order of 8040 yen (shipping included). I made a spreedsheet to gauge whether it’d actually be worth continuing from Mandarake as opposed to buying from Amazon jp and getting entirely new books.
Mandarake worked to about half of what these would cost on Amazon. Though on Amazon you don’t pay for customs as long as your order is under 3950-ish yen, and their shipping for DHL is a lot cheaper as well. This doesn’t take into account that a lot of manga just aren’t on amazon but I used other manga with the same prices in lieue of that.
Personally I’d only recommend using Mandarake if the books are less than half to a quarter of their price on Amazon.
Hm. Yeah, this definitely seems to be a better deal for those living in the US. European DHL seems to be more expensive, and you get hit with customs at a much lower threshold.
At least here in Sweden that would be the case regardless of where you buy from, so in my experience mandarake always comes out much cheaper anyway just because the prices are so much lower
DHL just emailed you and calculated themselves how much they want? 
You mean you don’t get all this mess with phones and asking about the content of the package, what is the indended usage of the item, what is the item made of, requesting screenshots of the order details, confirmation of the payment from the bank and then a looong silence while they are calculating for days/weeks all while threatening you that will charge you for storage, too? (They didn’t after all.)
The main reason I use Amazon is because with Amazon, they take care of all this while package is still travelling and there’s no delay with delivery.
Other shops would be so much nicer to use if I just could receive a final customs amount, pay it and be done with it!
Sure sounds like you’ve been through some shit with customs. This is the email I received a couple hours after I placed the order: 
Omg. So nice. 
I think it’s depending on the country, then, because when I was googling it out of frustration, there were many stories just like mine or even more messed up.
Yeesh. Yeah, I’ve also heard tell of DHL charging a customs handling fee in European/Middle Eastern countries as well. Basically, you’re not paying customs, but you’re paying DHL a fee for potentially having to deal with customs, whether or not there’s any duty to pay on the items.
In the US, as long as you’re under $200, you’re golden. No duty, no fuss.
Can’t check shipping prices without having an account? That sucks.
Looking at some stuff. 484 on Amazon JP, 320 on Mandarake. Seems like it would probably be worth it, but can’t actually tell unless I make an account. Although, I do like new over used. Might be worth the extra 164…
$200?!
So envious.
Well, at least now I understand better why you like Mandarake so much. 
Definitely go for the new imo. There are some older manga like the earlier One Punch Man volumes that you can get for 150 yen a pop. Or the entire GANTZ set for 5500 yen.
Happily received the entire series of InitialD manga in the mail today. It also seems like I purchased the last one. Took less than a week to ship.
How was the shipping on that? Been eyeing a 42 volume set myself. Toying with the idea of new from Amazon, but shipping is almost the same as the books themselves.