Over the last year, and especially during the last couple of months, I’ve gotten pretty big into collecting these Funko Pop! figures. It started innocently enough, I did a couple of the subscription boxes, I started finding some more that I really liked. Then I hit a tipping point. Not only was I looking in stores, I started searching online for some of those grails. Nothing too over the top, but I’ve found a few hard-to-find figures online. I’m sure we all have some tricks to saving money, but I wanted to share some of mine here (and yes, many of these have referral or affiliate links – You don’t have to use them but if you do I’d appreciate it!).
First of all, I use one of two sources to start my search. The first is ebates. We’ve all seen the ads, and they’re pretty straightforward. Start your shopping through their site, they get a referral fee and give a portion back to you. I’ve been using ebates for a while and over that time I’ve received over $350 back. It’s a great resource not just for Pops but for any online shopping. So start there. If you haven’t signed up yet, use my referral link: https://www.ebates.com/r/JAIMEH27?eeid=28187
My other starting spot is the ibotta app. Ibotta works in two ways. First, for normal shopping trips (say to Target or Walmart) you unlock offers, then scan your receipt and get a rebate. The other way it works is if you launch from their app, you can get a percentage of your purchase back (for example, as of this writing you can get up to 2% back on your ebay purchase). If you don’t have ibotta, use my referral link to sign up: https://ibotta.com/r/itvfdas
OK, so you’ve found the Pop you want. You’ve used one of the two methods above to save some money. Now it’s time to pay. For this I’ll use Raise. Raise is a website/app that lets you buy and sell unwanted gift cards (in my case, I’ll generally be buying them). Depending on the site and the availability, you can get pretty big discounts, but even smaller ones are pretty nice! For example, the last time I checked an ebay gift card was at a 1.5% discount. Just buy the amount you need, and apply the gift cards at checkout! And as a bonus,use that ebates link I mentioned above to get a rebate on your Raise purchase! If you aren’t a Raise member, use my referral code: http://geta.raise.com/jhorio
Let’s run a quick example. Say you find a pop on ebay that you really want, and you’re able to get it for $25. You started through ibotta, so you’ll get 2% back. That’s $0.50. You want to use a gift card, so you start at ebates and use that referral to get a 1% rebate on your Raise purchase. That’s another $0.25. And you saved 1.5% on the gift card, so that’s another $0.37 in savings. That’s $1.12 off. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it starts to add up. Plus if you’re using a rewards card for the purchase you get that bonus as well (I won’t get into that in this post).
As an added bonus, the referral links above generally have a signup bonus as well!
I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to save on your Pop purchases, but I wanted to share my main method when I’m splurging on those rare figures! If you’ve got other ways you save, tell me in the comments!
And come see parts of my collection and my new finds on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/funkopopquest/