The core function of Yahoo is an auction house so you can assume a lot about it and you'll probably be correct. There are buyers and sellers. Auctions have pictures, descriptions, and other information. The auction runs for a period of time then ends. You bid and win or lose, communicate with the Seller make payment or send the item, then leave feedback. It's not really rocket science. Just like eBay there are a few practices that most people use, but also there are a few tweaks and changes that make the site better or worse depending on your opinion.
Registration
You start with Yahoo by registering. In order to register you must be able to input a Japanese zip code. You choose your user name and password. A Yahoo email account is automatically set up with your username and that is your promary email account. You start of with a feeback rating of 0. It's your typical registration process.
Bidding
With a regular account you can only bid up to 4,999 yen. In order to have this restriction released you must register a Japanese credit card or bank account with your Yahoo account. In the past they'd send a form to your house and make you sign it in person to confirm your identity, but they've done away with that recently. Now they use the "Premium" system linked with your credit card and they charge you about $3.50 a month for this.
Auctions
Auctions are like any other. They have titles, descirptions, etc. It's different than eBay in that you don't necessarily have to define payment or shipping. Some auctions have little to no information about that but most of them do noawdays. You can see the Seller's feedback, you can ask him qustions, you can see his other items, etc.
Yahoo only allows you to upload 3 pictures for each auction. You can link in more pictures, but a vast majority of Sellers on Yahoo don't know how to do that so in any give auction you'll see 1-3 pictures only. They set a maximum number of pictures you can link in but Sellers can get around that by combining pictures into one picture file. That's what I do. Auctions can have reserves and Buy It Now. The Buy It Now setting is a bit unique in that it stays until someone buys it or the auction ends. On eBay if there is an opening price and a higher Buy It Now price, the Buy It Now option disappears when a bid is placed. No so on Yahoo. You can still use Buy It Now even if someone has placed a bid.
Yahoo has a new "Make an Offer" feature which is the blue icon. It's very, very rarely used and so far no Seller has accepted any offer that I've made. Asking sellers to reduce the price or end auctions early just doesn't really fly on Yahoo. It's not something they do in Japan overall.
You can have your auction run from 1 to 7 days. You can even choose the end time for your auction based on the hour, so you can start a listing today and choose to have it end in 5 days between 9 and 10 PM. The auctions have a lot of bells and whistles that you can add like bold or "gift icons" and little things of that nature. Over the last few years they've added a lot of extras to generate fees.
A Seller can end the auction at any time for about $5. He can choose to make the high bidder the winner or he can chose to cancel the auction overall without a winner. He can also do that anytime he wants, even right before the listing ends. on eBay you cannot cancel auctions when there is less than 12 horus remaining. The Seller can choose to ban people who have feedback scores of -1 or worse, or they can create a ban list to stop certain users from bidding on their auctions.
Yahoo has recently added a link to report auctions to the administration if there is anything illegal there. I've had one item of mine reported as illegal even though it wasn't, but in the end I didn't even get an email from Yahoo. My guess is that they don't really take it very seriously yet. Yeah, there are illegal items like firearms, animals, etc, but in reality the system isn't policed for things like pirated items.
A Seller can choose to auto-relist items that don't sell. You can choose from 1 to 3 times and Yahoo will automatically start the auction again with the same terms if no one buys it. That's done when you first create the listing.
Protecting Identities
Yahoo now protects the identity of the bidders to some extent. This isn't an option that Sellers choose, it's something built-in to every listing. It will show the first 3 characters of a person's name only, then asterisks after. An example would be "abc*******". It shows your their feedback rating so you can figure out who it is sometimes if you know a lot of the same bidders. It shows you their feedback number but you cannot click on it and see their past deals. You can click on the number of bidders number and see a list of who is bidding but again it will just show you their abbreviated names and you cannot click on their feedback. Once you place a bid you will be able to see the full name of the other bidders and you can click on their feedback to see their past deals.
Extending the Auction
One of the more unique features of Yahoo Auctions is that the auction can be extended by 5 minutes if there is a bid in the last 5 minutes. So if someone places a bid with 2 minutes left the timer will get extended to 7 minutes. Then if the timer falls to 4 minutes left and another bid comes in the it starts the process over again and adds another 5 minutes. I've seen auctions stretch out for hours past their original ending time because people go back and forth and raise the bid with a minute left and extend the auction another 5 minutes. I've also returned home thinking I've missed the end of an auction only to see that two people have been bidding and stopping the auction from ending at which point I was able to jump in and win the auction in the end. In order to have this feature in the auction a Seller must select it, but most of them do.
English Descriptions
One of the newer features is the ability to add a description in English. Yahoo doesn't translate your Japanese description, it gives you an additional box to type in the English description. Once you choose that option and enter the description it will show an "English" icon at top that people can click on to see the English description. This option is also important because by adding an English description the item will appear in Yahoo's English site. That's why Yahoo has millions of listings on its Japanese site and just a handful of listing on their English site. It's because 99.99% of Sellers don't bother with an English description so 99.99% of the auctions don't show up on the English site. And when they do show up the description often says something like, "Hello, I am Hiroshi."
Asking Questions
You can ask questions to Sellers, but the question will only appear on the listing if the Seller chooses to respond. If the Seller does not respond then the question will never be shown. Sellers don't respond to questions at the same rate that eBay Sellers do and I'm not sure why.
The End of the Auction
Once the auction ends and you're the winner then you have to communicate with the Buyer/Seller. Yahoo made a message system called "Navi" that's built in to the auction for communication. It's much better than the older method involving emails since scammers knew Yahoo created an email account with the person's screen name. A scammer could make a smiliar looking account (using a zero instead of an "o", for example) and pretend that they were the Seller. Then they'd send emails to the 2nd or 3rd highest bidder pretending to be the Seller and offering to sell the item to them.
Anyway, there is no invoicing, you just exchange information on the Navi system like address and bank details. Sellers usually put the tracking information there after they ship.
Feedback
Buyers and Sellers can leave feedback. You have a total rating of positives and negatives. If you have 500 positives and 10 negatives then your rating is 490 which is what shows on the auction page. You can see the Seller's feedback history broken down in terms of good/bad ratings for buying and selling. Yahoo also has a middle rating for something not good or bad but most people don't use that. Unlike eBay, you're allowed to change the feedback you left for someone else after you've made it. Maybe you give someone a negative and find out it was a misunderstanding so you can change that to positive later on. You can also make comments on the feedback and I've seen some conversations go back and forth for half a page as the Buyer and Seller continue to hash things out through the feedback page.
