How to buy Labubu at retail price: where to look, what the limits are, and what to do when a box is sold out
A year ago the question was how to beat the queue. In November 2026 it is closer to the opposite: should you be paying anyone a premium at all? Pop Mart said on 27 October that its July–September revenue fell 45% to 50% from a year earlier, and CNBC reported that sales in the Americas fell 70% to 75%.
A resale price check turns up the same shift. The practical advice has changed with it, and a lot of the guides still ranking for this topic were written when stock was truly scarce.
This guide covers the places that sell Labubu and other Pop Mart blind boxes at the company's own prices, how the app drop system works, what a sold-out page usually means, and how to decide whether a resale price is worth it. Prices, purchase limits and drop rules change often, and several figures below come from 2025 news reports. Each is dated, and you should confirm the current version on Pop Mart's own product page before you act on it.
The short version
A standard sealed box has recently listed at roughly $27 in the US. Pop Mart's own site and app, its stores, Robo Shop vending machines and its official marketplace storefronts are the routes that sell at that price; a marketplace listing is only that if the seller name is Pop Mart. There is no official restock schedule, so the launch time on the product page is the only reliable signal. With resale now clearing near or below retail on some series, waiting has lately been the cheaper option.
What "retail price" means right now
On Pop Mart's US site, a standard Labubu blind box has recently been listed at around $27. USA Today, reporting on September 2025 restocks, gave $27.99 for the Big Into Energy and Have a Seat boxes. A late-2026 explainer in Open magazine says the US site lists Big Into Energy at $26.99. The two are a year apart and may reflect a price change, a sale, or a difference between product pages. Either way, the working number is roughly $25 to $30 per sealed box in the US, before tax and shipping, and anything far above that is a reseller's price.
Plush pendants, larger figures and special collaborations sit in different price bands and are listed individually. The rest of this guide is about the standard blind box, since that is where most of the buying confusion sits.
If you are new to the format and want to understand what the odds do to the cost, the pull-rate guide runs the arithmetic on a 1-in-N chase.
Where Pop Mart sells at its own prices
There are four routes that reporting and Pop Mart's own materials point to. They are not equally easy.
The Pop Mart website and app. This is the main route and the one with the clearest rules. Each product page shows the item and, for launches, a date and time. The app also runs Pop Now, described in the next section.
Pop Mart stores. Stock depends on the day and the shop. Open magazine reports that the company's store count in the Americas rose from 41 to 86 in the first half of 2026 compared with a year earlier, so there is more chance than before of a shop being near you. Check the store's own listing for hours, because stock policy can differ by location.
Robo Shops (vending machines). The Star Tribune described Robo Shop restocks in June 2025 as unannounced, with no purchase limit, meaning whoever arrives first can empty a machine. That makes them a lottery on timing. They are worth a look if one sits on your normal route and you do not mind coming away with nothing.
Official marketplace storefronts. Pop Mart has run an official store on platforms such as TikTok Shop and Amazon. Check that the seller name is Pop Mart itself, because third-party sellers on the same platform set their own prices and are not the brand.
One caution on the stores. After disorder in queues, Pop Mart's UK arm suspended in-store sales of Labubu in May 2025. That was a temporary measure in one country and has no bearing on what US stores do today, but it illustrates that in-store rules can change without much notice.
How Pop Now works, and why it catches people out
Pop Now is the feature in the Pop Mart app that sells blind boxes online one at a time. According to USA Today's September 2025 coverage, you scroll through a virtual shelf and choose a specific box, and the box is held for you for five minutes. Once checkout begins, you then have 15 minutes to pay before it is released back. Pop Now does not sell whole sets, and the same report put the cap during those restocks at six single boxes per customer. Orders of $29 or more shipped free.
Those are 2025 mechanics for specific restocks, so treat them as a description of how the system tends to behave, not as current terms. The part that does not change much is the practical lesson. Have your payment method saved before a drop, and do not browse away mid-checkout, because the timers are short.
One other detail from the same report is easy to miss: depending on how the drop is set up, you may be able to open the box online to see its contents before it ships. That is a feature of Pop Now, not of every purchase route. If you buy in a store or from a vending machine, the box stays sealed.
When is the next restock? Mostly, nobody will tell you
Pop Mart told the Miami New Times that there is no official restock schedule. That matches what the monitoring service Visualping says: launch dates and times are shown on each product page, the company has pointed to Friday store launches and late-evening online drops, and reports of the pattern conflict with each other. Visualping's own advice is the sensible one: go by the launch time on the page for the specific item, not by a rumoured weekly pattern.
Community tips collected from Reddit by SheKnows, such as being signed in early and expecting evening drops around 10 p.m. Eastern, are worth knowing as habits but are not official. The plain way to use all this is to open the product page on the day before a drop, read the time listed, and set a reminder on your own phone.
A sold-out page does not always mean the end
The page is telling you the item is gone for now. It does not say whether more will arrive. What you can do in practice:
- Check the product page for a listed launch or restock time, and open the app on that date. Without a listed time, assume nothing is scheduled.
- Look at nearby stores' own pages. Store stock varies, and a shop can have a series that the site does not.
- Choose a different series or a figure you would be equally happy with. Pop Mart's supply has risen sharply: Inside Retail Asia reported that the company raised Labubu output roughly tenfold.
- Wait. This sounds like a non-answer, but the resale data below suggests that waiting has been the cheaper option more often than not recently.
The resale market, in numbers
Secondary-market prices are the part that moved most. Here is what the sources actually say.
| Item | Resale figure reported | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Big Into Energy blind box | Averaged $6 across 36 StockX sales in the three months before publication | Open magazine, late 2026 |
| Identified secret figure from that series | Averaged $70 across 95 StockX sales in the same window | Open magazine, late 2026 |
| Many Labubu models | Resale prices fell by more than half; some slipped below retail | Inside Retail Asia, 30 Oct 2026 |
Open magazine itself cautions that the $6 figure is a snapshot from one marketplace, and the article does not give exact sale dates. One platform's average is not the market. Still, the direction is hard to dispute: Inside Retail Asia says the same, and Chinese outlet Yicai was already reporting in December 2025 that some products traded under their shelf price, as summarised by Ayers HS Magazine.
There is a second half to this. The secret figure averaged $70 against a $27-ish box. That is the gap you pay to skip the lottery. At roughly $27 per box, $70 is the price of about 2.6 boxes. Pop Mart does not publish the odds for secret figures, so no one outside the company can tell you whether buying boxes or buying the figure directly is cheaper in expectation. What you can do is set your own limit before you start: decide the most you will spend, and buy the secret outright if the resale price is below what you would otherwise be willing to spend on boxes.
Why scarcity felt different a year ago, and what to watch before the holidays
It helps to know what you are comparing against. Inside Retail Asia notes that the third quarter of 2025 was the biggest in Pop Mart's history, with revenue up 245% to 250% and overseas sales up 365% to 370%. Reuters reported at the time that, after the summer boom, it was almost impossible to buy a Labubu from a Pop Mart store. Against that peak, a 45% to 50% fall still leaves revenue well above the third quarter of 2024, by Inside Retail Asia's arithmetic roughly 70% to 90% higher. So the brand is not gone. Demand has come down from an unusually high point, and stock is easier to find.
One thing could tighten supply again. Inside Retail Asia reports that management expects every region to grow from the previous quarter during the fourth-quarter holiday season. Holiday gifting, new series and collaborations are the usual moments when a popular item sells through quickly. If you want a specific figure as a gift, do not leave it to the last week of December, and read the launch time on the page for that product.
If you do buy resale, protect yourself
Counterfeits are the real risk at a lower price point, because a cheap listing is exactly where a fake fits in. Our guide on telling a real Labubu from a fake covers the physical checks. Beyond that, a few buying habits cut the risk:
- Compare with sold listings, not asking prices. Asking prices are wishes. Sold prices are what people actually paid.
- Prefer sellers with a long history in this category and photos that show the exact item, not a stock image.
- Use a payment method with buyer protection, and keep screenshots of the listing and messages.
- Be wary of a price far below the going rate. A bargain that is too good to be true usually is.
Things not to bother with
Automated buying tools and scripts keep appearing in search results for this topic. We are not recommending them. Using them is likely to run against the app's terms of use, it is unfair to other buyers, and an account ban is a poor trade for a $27 box. With supply up and prices down, the case for them is weaker than it was.
Paying a large premium for a standard box from a social media seller is the other trap. If the data above is any guide, the premium is shrinking, and the safest premium is no premium.
A simple plan for the next month
- Decide whether you want a particular figure or just a blind box. The two need different strategies.
- Set a price ceiling, including shipping, and write it down.
- Check the Pop Mart product page for a listed launch time and set a phone reminder.
- Have the app installed, signed in, and a payment method saved before the drop.
- If it sells out, compare resale sold prices against your ceiling. Over it, wait.
Questions buyers ask
Is there a limit on how many Labubu boxes I can buy?
Sometimes. USA Today reported a limit of six single boxes per customer on the September 2025 Pop Now restocks, and a retailer blog reported a limit of two on an earlier collection. Limits are set per launch, so read the product page. Robo Shops were reported to have none.
When does Pop Mart restock?
There is no official schedule, according to the company's comment to Miami New Times. Launch times, when they exist, appear on the product page.
Is buying from a reseller safe?
It carries more risk than buying from Pop Mart, mainly from counterfeits and from overpaying. Use buyer protection and compare with sold prices.
Why are resale prices falling?
Nobody outside Pop Mart can say with certainty. Inside Retail Asia links it to the company raising output about tenfold, and analysts and the company itself told Reuters in 2025 that the issue was supply rather than demand. Falling interest is another reasonable reading, and the two may both be true.
Will prices come back up?
We cannot know. Collectible prices can rise again for a limited release, so this article should not be read as a prediction.
Sources
- Pop Mart trading update, 27 October 2026, and CNBC's reporting on Americas sales — as cited above.
- Open magazine, late 2026 — US list price and StockX resale averages.
- USA Today, September 2025 — restock prices, Pop Now mechanics, purchase limits.
- Inside Retail Asia, 30 October 2026 — output increase, resale decline, quarterly comparisons.
- Reuters, 2025 — store availability at the peak.
- Miami New Times — no official restock schedule; Visualping — launch times appear on product pages.
- Star Tribune, June 2025 — Robo Shop restock behaviour.
Prices and drop rules change; confirm on Pop Mart's own product page before you buy.