Frequently Asked Questions
General
What is this website?
buyfinder.moe searches and compares prices 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 it is in our database or 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 (MFC)?
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.
How can I start a search?
Simply by entering a JAN, a MFC link or keywords related to the figure in the search bar.
For the latter, a list of items should appear below the search bar. Just clicking on the desired one should bring you to its page.
If you don't find what you want, it probably means that it is not in the database yet, so you should try with a JAN or MFC link instead.
Once on the figure's page, click on the "Start searching" button to start a search.
Results for this item are then saved for 8 hours and no new searches can be made during this time.
If you arrived on a figure's page with results already found, it means someone made a search earlier for the same item.
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 false negatives (missed hits) at the expense of getting more false positives (wrong results).
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 the entry contains incorrect or incomplete 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 if prices are too high or if 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 someone searches for a figure you are currently watching.
What are Watch Points?
They are points that allow you to set your watches to be automatically searched every 10 to 20 minutes. One point is equivalent to one search per shop, and you can obtain them either by buying them or by correctly reporting wrong results.
Each correct report can earn you up to 200 Watch Points depending on how popular the item is and at least 100 Watch Points if it has a JAN, 20 otherwise.
You can set any number of watches to be automatically searched, but the more watches there are and the more shops are searched, 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 buy or earn more points.
There is currently no upper limit on the number of points you can accumulate.
Why are my Watch Points being spent more slowly than expected?
In order to preserve server resources, some shops—even if selected—won't be searched because the chances of finding the watched item there are virtually non-existent (e.g. a garage kit on the Good Smile Company store.)
Since the search isn't made, points aren't being deducted.
Premium
What is Premium?
It's a monthly subscription to access extra features on this website.
What features are available?
With a Premium 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.
Premium users can also start multiple searches for different items on the website at the same time without having to wait for the previous ones to finish first.
More benefits are planned to be added to Premium in the future. If you have ideas or suggestions, contact us at [email protected].
How far back do the price charts go and how precise are they?
Since buyfinder only gets price data when searches are made, prices can only go back as early as the release of this site, which is around March 2023, so older 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 Premium subscription cost?
2.00 USD per month.
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?
They are 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 up to 200 Watch Points per report by correctly reporting wrong results.
Your watch points will be credited after an admin has verified the report.
What is considered a wrong/missing result?
A result is considered wrong if it contains:
A listing for a different item
Includes different versions of an item that have separate entries on MFC.
Also, sets are not considered wrong as long as they contain the correct item.- A bootleg or counterfeit item
- A broken link or a page that is not a product page
A product that is currently sold out
This is mostly intended to find bugs where a hit is found during a search you started but the item is not actually in 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)
buyfinder gets prices from a single currency per shop, usually the shop's default currency.
If you display prices in a different currency, it is possible that the indicated price will not exactly match the listed price because of differences in exchange rates and is 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.