Secret Shopper review: Can Pop Mart make buying a blind box online more fun than doing it in-store?
Pop Mart's new Pop Now feature brings hints, digital unboxing and a little probability into the online blind box experience. RTIH’s Secret Shopper puts it to the test and ends up calling in AI to hunt for Woody from Toy Story.
Anyone who has been following Secret Shopper for a while will probably know that beauty is only one of the ways I can be persuaded to part with money. I also have a considerable soft spot for little trinkets, collectibles and, perhaps most dangerously, blind boxes.
Pop Mart has featured in this column more than once, so regular readers will already know I have a real soft spot for the brand. When an email arrived introducing Pop Now, its new way of buying and instantly unboxing selected blind boxes online, I was always going to give it a try.
Pop Mart’s Pop Now experience lets shoppers choose a set, pick a box, shake for hints and reveal their blind box online.
The premise is clever. Rather than selecting a blind box from a normal product page, paying and then waiting several days to discover what you have bought, Pop Now turns the purchase itself into part of the entertainment. You choose an eligible series, select a set of boxes, “shake” individual boxes to receive clues about what is not inside, make your choice and then digitally unbox it there and then.
I expected it to be fun. What I did not expect was to end up enjoying parts of the experience more than choosing a blind box in-store.
How Pop Now works
Pop Now’s Shake for Hints feature rules out characters before purchase, helping shoppers narrow down what may be inside.
Not every Pop Mart series currently supports Pop Now, and the selection available when I tested it was weighted towards newer releases. Once you find one that does, however, the process is very easy to understand.
Pop Mart breaks it down into three stages: Pick a Box, Shake for Hints and Unbox Now.
I started with the £21 DIMOO WORLD Pixar Series Vinyl Plush Pendant Blind Box, partly because I liked several of the characters and partly because there was one I particularly wanted: Woody.
The line-up included Woody, Red Panda Mei, Lotso, Remy, Sulley and Dash Parr, alongside Buzz Lightyear as the secret option. I would have happily taken several of them, but Woody was the goal.
Once I selected a group of six boxes, I could click into each one and shake it. Rather than telling me what was inside, Pop Now gave me two characters that definitely were not. That small change makes the whole experience considerably more involving than clicking “add to basket” on a normal blind box.
I started moving between boxes and gathering exclusions. One was not Remy or Red Panda Mei. Another ruled out Remy and Lotso. Elsewhere, Sulley disappeared from contention, then Woody was eliminated from another box entirely.
Pop Mart keeps track of this through a Box Status page, which brings the information for all six together. By this stage, what should have been a fairly simple purchase had become a surprisingly entertaining process of elimination.
For anyone who likes blind boxes because of the anticipation around them, it is a very good idea. Pop Mart has not told you what you are buying, but it has given you just enough information to make you feel as though you might be able to outsmart the box.
Shake, eliminate and try again
Box Status gathers the clues for all six blind boxes in one place, making it possible to compare the exclusions before choosing.
There is another interesting element to the system. If you do not like the clues you are getting from a particular set of six, you do not necessarily have to buy one.
I discovered that if I came out of that set and returned later, I could be presented with a different group of boxes and start again. The first time I tried the Pixar set, the exclusions were not particularly useful for somebody trying to find Woody, so I left it and came back.
The next set was much more promising. This is where Pop Now starts to feel quite different from buying a blind box off a shelf. In store, once you have picked one up, you can shake it, weigh it in your hand and convince yourself that you have developed some highly sophisticated method for predicting what is inside, but ultimately you know very little. Here, you have information.
You can also get further clues through Hint Cards. Pop Mart's Lucky Points system lets users redeem points for these, and the site also encourages people to earn points through daily tasks. I had eight points at the time and needed 10 for the additional hint I wanted, which was slightly frustrating because I was close enough to see exactly what Pop Mart was trying to tempt me into doing.
I was planning to buy another box anyway, this time from the SKULLPANDA My Little Pony series, so that purchase gave me enough points to start using the additional hints.
This is probably the one part of the system I would mark down slightly. The basic shakes are free and already useful, while regular users can accumulate points in other ways, but once you realise an extra clue could eliminate another character, it is very easy to want one more Hint Card. Pop Mart knows its audience.
Then I brought in AI
At the beginning of this test, I had decided I was not going to use AI. However, that didn’t last long!
Once I had accumulated clues across the six Pixar boxes, I realised I was essentially staring at a probability problem. Some boxes could already be ruled out for Woody completely, while others had several competing characters eliminated. Rather than trying to work it all out manually, I entered the information into AI and asked it which box gave me the strongest statistical chance of getting the character I wanted.
It came back with box four, estimating my chances of Woody at around 41%.
That was hardly a guarantee, but in blind box terms I was prepared to take 41%, particularly when several of the alternatives had already been ruled out. It is worth stressing that AI had no way of knowing what was physically inside the box. All it could do was interpret Pop Mart's own clues and calculate where Woody appeared most likely to be.
I selected box four, completed the purchase and started the online reveal. A few seconds later, Woody appeared on screen, complete with a “Congrats!” message and another three Lucky Points added to my account.
I was delighted, although I suspect successfully using AI to find the exact character I wanted may have made this feature considerably more dangerous for me in future.
It also raises an interesting possibility for Pop Mart. I cannot imagine I will be the only person who looks at the Box Status screen and decides to hand the clues to ChatGPT or another AI tool. Pop Now has effectively created a mini logic puzzle around the purchase, and collectors who are particularly determined to find a certain character now have quite a lot more to work with than luck alone.
Digital unboxing is much more fun than it sounds
After the hints were analysed with AI, box four was selected and the digital reveal confirmed Woody was inside.
One of my biggest questions before trying Pop Now was whether revealing the character on a screen would feel a bit flat.
A large part of the appeal of blind boxes is physical: opening the outer box, tearing into the foil bag and getting that first glimpse of whether you have found the one you wanted. Taking the product out of that moment sounds as though it should remove some of the excitement. Pop Mart has done a surprisingly good job of preserving it.
Once the purchase is complete, the screen changes and the character is revealed through an animated digital unboxing sequence. You know immediately what you have bought, the result is added to your account and you earn more Lucky Points along the way.
I tested it again with my SKULLPANDA My Little Pony purchase and got Fluttershy. I had been less particular about the exact result with that series, although there were still a couple I would have preferred to avoid, so the hints were useful without turning it into quite the same mission that finding Woody had become.
What I particularly like is that Pop Now gives online shopping an event at the point where most e-commerce becomes rather boring. Normally, you choose a product, enter payment details and receive an order confirmation. Here, checkout is followed by the bit you have been waiting for.
There is still the physical arrival to look forward to later, but you have already had the reveal.
I nearly complained about the shipping
There was one part of the experience that initially annoyed me, until I realised I had misunderstood what Pop Mart was doing.
After buying the first Pop Now item, I wanted to add something inexpensive from the normal Pop Mart shop to push the order over the free shipping threshold. I could not combine the two in the usual basket, and my first reaction was that separating Pop Now purchases from the rest of the site felt unnecessarily restrictive.
Then I found My Cabinet. Rather than every Pop Now purchase immediately becoming a separate shipment, unboxed items are stored digitally in the Cabinet section of your account. From there, you choose when you want them sent out. Pop Mart says users can manually trigger shipment within 30 days, after which items can be automatically sent to the default delivery address.
That means somebody buying several Pop Now boxes over a period of time can keep them together and then ship the collection rather than repeatedly paying for individual deliveries. You can also send an item from your Cabinet directly to somebody else's address if you want to use a blind box as a gift.
Once I understood the system, I preferred it to the normal basket approach. It makes Pop Now feel like its own little collecting environment inside the wider Pop Mart site, and it makes much more sense for people who are likely to return and buy several boxes rather than stopping at one.
Pop Mart also states that boxes purchased from the same set will not contain duplicates, which is another very collector-friendly detail if you decide to buy several at once.
Does knowing more ruin the point of a blind box?
This was probably the biggest question I had by the end. If part of the appeal is not knowing what you are buying, surely giving customers clues about the contents risks spoiling it?
For me, it did the opposite. Even after shaking boxes, using an additional hint and getting AI involved, I still only had an estimated 41% chance of finding Woody. There was plenty of uncertainty left, but I had been able to rule out some outcomes I did not particularly want and make a more informed choice. That becomes increasingly attractive when individual blind boxes cost £20 or more.
There is also a strategy to the way you use Pop Now. If the first six boxes give you nothing useful, you can leave and try another set later. If you have points, you can decide whether a Hint Card is worth using. If you are interested in several characters, you may barely need the additional clues at all. For a blind box aficionado, there is quite a lot to play with.
I can also see the appeal for people who normally avoid blind boxes because they hate the possibility of spending a reasonable amount of money on the one character they do not want. Pop Now does not remove that possibility, but it gives you a little more control without turning the product into a normal, fully selectable purchase.
The verdict
Pop Mart has managed to take something that is inherently physical and make the online version feel like an experience in its own right.
The shaking mechanic is simple but addictive, the Box Status page encourages you to compare your options, Hint Cards add another layer for people who want to go further and the immediate digital reveal preserves much more of the blind-box excitement than I expected.
The Cabinet system is also smarter than it initially appears, particularly for repeat customers, while the no-duplicates rule within a set removes one of the biggest frustrations for collectors buying several boxes.
There are things I would like to see improved. The Pop Now range available to me was still fairly limited, and I would like to see far more existing Pop Mart series added rather than the feature being concentrated around newer products. I am also slightly wary of just how effectively the Lucky Points and Hint Cards can encourage you towards one more purchase or one more clue. But those are relatively minor criticisms of an experience I enjoyed far more than I expected.
In some ways, I preferred it to buying a completely random blind box in store because there was more to do before committing. The surprise was still there, but so was a little strategy, and the fact that my first serious attempt ended with the exact Woody I wanted certainly did not hurt.
I will absolutely use Pop Now again. Whether allowing me to combine blind boxes with AI powered probability calculations was a wise decision for my bank balance is another matter.
Secret Shopper rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
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