Hi!
I’m taking my first steps as a collector and I had marked today’s date on my calendar to preorder the box via Whiterabbit because I was very excited for this product. I checked the official website and it seems that they changed the preorder option for a raffle because of the high demand. Now I don’t know what to do to buy this box because I don’t live in Japan. Are you in a similar situation? Could anyone give me some advice to get this product? Is there any way to get a preorder from another country that I don’t know of? Am I missing something? I’ve searched on Ebay and some people are already selling it for a much higher price.
Long story short, you cannot preorder it outside of Japan. There are several lottery methods, but to the best of my knowledge all of them require you to pick up the box in-person at a Japanese post office if you win.
Us westerners will have to wait for the box to hit the secondary market and just buy from there.
Yep. What Fourth said. You have to win one of like 100,000 lottery tickets that allow you to show up to a post office with your ID that matches your lottery submission winning ticket to be able to make an in-store purchase.
Gone are the days of preordering Japanese product from middleman sites, at least until the western demand cools down. Everyone is trying to buy Japanese to make mega stonks on eBay
After the initial Dumpster fire that was the Eevee Heroes pre-sale, canceling all of those proxy-server bot orders and switching it to a lottery worked out quite well.
I’d be panicking for this, but everyone here seems to be calm so I’ll chill for now and just hope that I can get my hands on one when the time comes, and hopefully for not too much of a markup. It’ll be fine, I tell myself.
Phase 1 - Apply at the International Stamp Exhibition being held in Yokohama between the 26th of July and the 8th of August.
Phase 2 - Apply at a local post office between the 22nd of August and September 10th.
Phase 3 - Apply online between the 1st of September and the 15th of September.
Look at it this way, you could buy a psa 10 lottery venusaur or blastoise holo from the early 2000’s for around 200 bucks less than 2 years ago and there are only 5,000 of each of those. There are 100,000+ of these boxes entering circulation all at once.
Whether through postcard or online, selected applicants can only purchase in person with ID verification (name and address) at their nominated post office in Japan.
None of these phases apply to people outside Japan. If you’re not living in Japan or don’t have any friends/family who live there, secondary market is the only way.
When would you say is the optimal time to order these stamp boxes? pre-ordering and ordering day 1 launch will probably be overpriced, so would you guys recommend waiting one month? 2 months?
No way to know for sure but typically I wait until the excitement has died off and wait until the price has stabilized. Usually a few months for that to happen from my experience. With this stamp box there is likely to be loads of scalpers reselling their box on to the secondary market anyways. There is also a decent amount of these boxes being made. This is not some limited release box with only 1,000 printed.
