In terms of versatility, it’s slightly inferior to Rinkya because it doesn’t serve as a bidding help/platform for auction sites like Y!AJ. However, the proxy service is a lot easier to use: you sign up, you immediately get a personal Tenso address, and you’re good to go (while Rinkya requires a long and tedious identification process). And they ship anytime in the week (unlike Rinkya who ships only twice a week, IIRC). Haven’t had the time to compare commission and other fees, though, but I guess both should be at the same range.

As I said, my only gripe with Tenso was that they didn’t seem to be able to join packages, thus forcing me to pay shipping+commission on the separate items and almost doubling the price tag. Now that I know that they can upon request (by providing the registered package numbers from the items page (they only do that on Wednesdays though)), it’s good. Once they provide an official option, it will be perfect. But it’s as said in the comments above, proxies only make sense if it can’t be helped!

Still, this Tenso is a cool concept.

Anyway, clearly the main use for Tenso would be in cases where the merchant doesn’t ship internationally, such as the marketplace, or Amazon’s game/toy inventory (or items sold by game publishers that are misclassified as games, like Key soundtracks and so on). In most cases, Amazon’s rates would otherwise actually work out to be a bit cheaper than EMS, except if you were ordering a large quantity of light items (since Amazon’s shipping rates are by quantity, and EMS is by weight). So, you are right that you wouldn’t want to have items go through them if they could otherwise be shipped directly to you. All the stuff they highlight on the site are cases where merchants won’t ship overseas. So that’s probably the main use. Like I said, it’s just one tool in the arsenal; certainly not the be-all-and-end-all.

At least for Europe, the difference with amazon’s rates were 0, if not more expensive. The only thing that would have been okay to ship with Tenso would have been the marketplace item which could not be sent internationally. In either case, it absolutely didn’t make sense to have the whole stuff sent to Tenso. Lesson learnt.