Frequently Asked Questions
General
What is this website?
buyfinder.moe is a price comparator for anime figures. It searches through multiple online hobby shops at the same time to find if the figure you're looking for is in stock and at what price. The results are then sorted by price so you can see the best offers first.
What can I search for?
As long as you have a MyFigureCollection link or a JAN of the item, pretty much anything, although in order to be as accurate as possible with the results, the search algorithm has been optimized for figures first. The shops that are searched have also been chosen because they sell figures but might not necessarily sell other goods.
What is MyFigureCollection?
MyFigureCollection is a database website that collects information about anime figures and goods. buyfinder can recognize a link to an entry on this website and recover information about it in order to search the item.
What is a JAN?
A JAN (Japanese Article Number) is simply a barcode. It is 13 digits long and is attributed to a specific item in order to identify it.
In case of anime figures and goods, it generally starts with 06, 45, 471, 49 or 69. Most online shops use JANs to reference their products and display it in their listings.
I tried searching for a figure but the results are for completely different items. What gives?
Some shops don't reference their catalog by JAN and sometimes items don't have any known JAN, which means buyfinder will have to search using keywords instead, making searching for a specific item a bit more tricky and inaccurate.
In that case, buyfinder mostly depends on the reliability of the shops' search engines, meaning that if results are wrong on a given shop, there is a chance it'll be wrong on buyfinder as well. To help mitigate this, we do our best to optimize searches and result filtering to make sure results are as accurate as possible, although we have chosen to be more lenient in the filtering algorithm to avoid missing potential hits (false negatives) at the expense of getting more wrong results (false positives).
Since buyfinder uses info found on MFC to search for the item, there is also a possibility that the item's MFC entry is incorrect. A wrong JAN or a wrong name will heavily throw off the searches.
While you can help us refine our algorithm thanks to Reports, you can also help by creating alerts on the MFC page of the item if you find the entry contains incorrect information about it.
Watches
What are watches?
Anime figures are usually limited in stock and as a result, their price and availability fluctuate with time. Watches help you keep track of those changes and notify you when new results or prices are found.
Watches can also be customized so you don't get notified in case prices are too high or you don't want or can't buy from certain shops.
When do I get notified?
Searches being quite computationally intensive, buyfinder cannot be constantly on the lookout for new results for every figure, meaning that new results can only be found when a user starts a search on the website.
As such, you'll only get notified of new results when other users search for a figure you're currently watching.
Premium
What is Premium?
It's a monthly subscription to access extra features on this website. There are currently two tiers: Starter and Premium
What features are available in the Starter tier?
With a Starter subscription, you have access to price charts. With them, you can follow the evolution of prices and know when is the best time to buy or sell your figures.
Those charts show price history for both new and pre-owned figures as well as the range of prices, with the possibility to filter by shop.
What features are available in the Premium tier?
As stated in the Watches section, you can only be notified of new results if a search is triggered by another user. If you're actively hunting for a figure, this can prove to be quite unreliable as you might miss restocks or other users can find out about a restock before you.
To help this that, Premium users have the benefit of being able to set up watches to be automatically searched every 10 to 20 minutes. Contrary to searches made on the website by other users, those automatic searches notify only you of new results.
They can also be fine-tuned by setting customized rules for each shop. You can change the queries used to search for the item and add keywords to exclude certain results.
In case multiple Premium users were to be watching the same figure, notifications will be sent on a first come, first served basis.
Also, while other users' searches are queued, Premium users can search multiple figures at the same time, and like Starter users, Premium users have access to price charts.
More benefits are planned to be added to Premium in the future. If you have ideas or suggestions, contact us at [email protected].
Can't I just refresh the page myself every few minutes to get new results?
Results for a given figure are cached for 8 hours to avoid having to refetch results everytime someone visits a figure's page. If you refresh the page during that time frame, you will get the same results.
How many watches can I set to be automatically searched?
For now, up to 10 per account. This is mostly to prevent abuse and keep the load on the server manageable. We might increase this limit in the future or offer different tiers.
How far back do the price charts go and how precise are they?
Since buyfinder gets price data only when searches are made, prices can only go back as early as the release of this site, which is around March 2023, and more popular figures will have more precise and complete charts.
With time, we expect charts to become more and more useful and detailled.
How much does a subscription cost?
2.00 USD per month for Starter and 5.00 USD per month for Premium.
How can I subscribe?
First, you need to be a registered user on the website. Sign up or sign in then head to your profile page and click on the "Subscribe" button.
I just subscribed but I can't access Premium features. What is happening?
Your account should be updated automatically after the payment has been confirmed but it is possible that it didn't happen for some technical reason.
Simply refreshing the website or signing out then signing in again should fix it, but in case it didn't, contact us at [email protected].
Reports
What are reports?
It's a way to flag results as being either wrong or missing, helping us weed out false data and refine our search algorithm.
You can report by clicking on the red flag on the right side of a result.
If you have an account and you are signed in, you can earn Watch Points by correctly reporting wrong results.
Your watch points will be credited after an admin has verified the report.
What are Watch Points?
They are points that allow you to set your watches to be automatically searched every 10 to 20 minutes, like for Premium users. One point is equivalent to one search, and you can earn 10 points for every correct report, which is roughly equivalent to 2 hours of automatic searches.
As long as there are watch points remaining on your account, you can set any number of watches to be automatically searched, but the more watches there are, the faster the points will be used.
Naturally, if you don't have any remaining points, the watches will no longer be automatically searched until you earn more points.
There is currently no upper limit on the number of points you can accumulate.
What is considered a wrong/missing result?
A result is considered wrong if it contains:
- A listing for a different item (applies to different versions of an item that have separate entries on MFC)
- A bootleg or counterfeit item
- A page that is not a product page
- A broken link
- A product that is currently sold out
Note: This is intended to find bugs during a search where a hit is found but there isn't actually any stock.
If the search was already made, it is possible there is no bug and the item simply sold out by the time you visited the page.
In this case, if the item is back in stock when your report gets verified by an admin, you might not get rewarded for it. - Wrong information like incorrect price or condition (used/new)
Note: buyfinder gets price data from a single currency per shop, usually the shop's default currency.
If you chose to display prices in a different currency, it is possible that the indicated price does not exactly match the price listed on the shop's website because of differences in exchange rates and is thus not considered wrong.
If the difference is too great however, a warning should be displayed on top of the result indicating that the shop inflates exchange rates on their site. If you don't see any warning however, you can report the result with an indication in the "Additional information" field of the report form that the warning is missing so it can be added.
A result is considered missing if it is displayed as having "No hits" despite the item being currently in stock in the shop in question. In this case, it is appreciated to add the link to the product page in the "Additional information" field of the report form.