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The story
Yodobashi Camera’s online store, “Yodobashi.com,” offers an “order online, pick up in store” service — and the fact that you can actually pick up items late at night, outside normal business hours, became a hot topic on social media after an ITmedia article spotlighted it. On 5channel (5ch), users shared firsthand accounts of ordering from their phone right outside the store and picking the item up the moment the “ready for pickup” notification arrived, effectively making 24-hour shopping possible. At the same time, discussion turned to the finer details — how long the wait actually is between placing an order and having the item ready, how out-of-stock items get handled — along with comparisons of price and selection against other retailers like Amazon.
Published September 5, 2026, 06:00 AM
[Rintaro Kaneko, ITmedia]
Yodobashi Camera’s web store “Yodobashi.com” offers an “order online, pick up in store” service, and the ability to pick up orders late at night — outside regular business hours — has become a major talking point on social media.
Source: itmedia.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
They've basically been forced to use 0.9x Yodobashi.com's price (10% points back on everything, plus free delivery) as their pricing benchmark.
Amazon's free delivery doesn't let you pick a time slot, so I barely buy from them anymore.
Pickup I get, but do they actually process the order and prep the item overnight? If so, that's godlike.
They do.
They do, but if you place the order online after you've already shown up at the store, it's not instant — you'll wait at least 30 minutes even in the best case. They run the store with a skeleton crew overnight, there are other customers already in the queue ahead of you, and staff have to go dig through the store to find your item (customers obviously don't get to walk the closed sales floor themselves), so it takes a while.
And if that particular store doesn't have the item in stock, obviously it's not showing up in 30 minutes. They bring it in from another location, so you're looking at half a day at best, up to two days if you're unlucky.
Thing is, it's usually not the same price…
And the selection's pretty weak too.
I searched and found Tirol Choco-branded puzzles and erasers.
Sounds like some people mistook the puzzle for an assorted chocolate box and bought it by accident.
24-hour service is nice, but since you're hauling stuff home by car anyway, a suburban distribution warehouse would honestly be more convenient than a downtown store.
Wouldn't delivery just be better?
It's basically like a late-night convenience store.
Convenience store pickup, PUDO lockers, Amazon Hub lockers —
take your pick.
What is this?
Did someone start a thread with an ad instead of an actual article?
Feels like it could help ease the load on distribution resources, but maybe it just wouldn't get used enough?
The usage fee would probably get tacked on too, I bet…
Well yeah, it's limited to stuff that's physically in the store.
Actually, even special-order items can't be picked up same-day, but they're still available for pickup 24 hours a day once ready.
The downsides are that way too many items are out of stock, and the order history search is just garbage.
and the 24-hour service is basically just a side effect of that.
It's also because you actually get the item you expected.
– sold by Amazon, shipped by Amazon
– sold by a third-party shop, shipped by Amazon
– sold by a shop, shipped by the shop
and each of these is a totally different situation.
At most, only the first two are even comparable to Yodobashi.com.
That last category has some decent sellers, but it's a minefield of slow shipping, so it's not really fair to compare.
Doesn't that just make them a middleman skimming a cut off the top, though~?
But even when you buy 'new' on Amazon, sometimes you get a grubby, obviously-handled 'used' item instead.
With Yodobashi you just get an actual new item, no drama.
Most of all, it doesn't clutter the results with a bunch of irrelevant junk — that's a huge plus.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The “order online, pick up in store” service itself has actually existed since around 2018, so it’s not exactly new. It generally only covers items already in stock at that specific store — special-order items are hard to pick up the same day, and depending on the store, the wait can run anywhere from half a day to two days. Even for late-night orders, items aren’t handed over instantly; staff have to locate and prepare them from the sales floor, so it typically takes around 30 minutes, longer when things are busy. In the thread, opinions split between praise for the convenience — “you can basically shop 24 hours a day” — and skepticism over whether staffing a pickup counter overnight actually costs more than just doing delivery, with reactions varying depending on whether people weighted convenience or operating costs more heavily. Comparisons with Amazon came up often too, though most claims about price, stock, and guaranteed-new condition were based on individual users’ personal experience rather than any official comparative data — worth keeping in mind.
*This article was compiled by excerpting and summarizing the 5channel (Business News+) thread “‘Late-Night Shopping at Yodobashi’ Stories Go Viral — Some Say They ‘Had No Idea’ About the Perks of 24-Hour Pickup.”
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