Are Lootie’s Mystery Boxes Paving the Way for Shopping?

A new trend has swept the e-commerce industry: mystery boxes. COVID-19 has put a halt to the ‘normal’ shopping life for most consumers. Gone are the days where you can browse the isles of your favourite departmental store at will — in some countries, you aren’t allowed to at all, and in others, you are made to wear a mask at all times. It’s simply not the same experience as being free: discovering new items on the shelves and being surprised by new things you didn’t even know existed.

When it comes to the standard online shopping experience (think Amazon or eBay), it has become a relatively mundane process. First, we think of the product we want. We then Google it and look at review comparison sites. These sites have rankings to tell us, unambiguously, which product will be best for us. We pick the product that seems most appropriate, search it up on an online catalog, and place it. There’s no thrill in that — no fun and no sense of excitement.

Mystery box online websites are switching up the scene, with Lootie in the forefront. With a mystery box purchase, you never know exactly what you are going to get: you can purchase a box with a given category or brand, but the exact item that you will receive remains a mystery until the unboxing. This is why it’s called a ‘mystery’ box, and it’s exactly what keeps the shopping experience entertaining. In the post-COVID era of lockdowns and boredom, sites like Lootie are paving the way for a completely new shopping experience — one that feels way more exciting than browsing the shelves of a real-life store — despite the fact that the entire shopping experience can be had in the comfort of your own home! Amongst the other big names, Lootie stands out as one of the best mystery box sites.

On Lootie, to get started, create an account and select a boxes menu. You can go for official Lootie boxes, or you can have a look at user-created ones as well. Each box shows you which prizes they contain. One box can have tens of different prizes (with a variety of items, regardless of whether it’s a Shoe mystery box or a Supreme box logo,) and each time you open it, you never know exactly what you will get. All you know is, you are guaranteed to get one prize from the given selection. This is especially useful for indecisive people, who know what sort of product they want (eg. an Apple mystery box, some Hypebeast shoes, maybe some Off White Box merch…) but don’t know the exact model number that they want to go for. With Lootie, they don’t have to make the hard decision — it’s quick and easy with a single unboxing.

Lootie is, like similar e-commerce platforms, not the original distributor of the products. That is, they ship the products to you directly from the brands every time you perform an unboxing. This can sometimes be a problem on other sites, such as eBay or Alibaba. Anywhere where there is a third-party merchant, the ability for fraud or dishonesty opens up — we’ve heard countless stories of eBay buyers receiving the wrong good, or something turns up broken… Amazon is a trusted platform in general, if you stick to goods sent directly from the Amazon warehouses. But if you go for third-party sellers on Amazon, it’s a gamble, since there are thousands of people who receive broken shipments from third-party sellers every single week. This is a huge problem with fragile tech products (accessible on Lootie via the Gaming mystery box) where third-party shipments from eBay often arrive with smashed screens or missing buttons!
With Lootie, the cat-and-mouse game of finding trusted platforms is over. As an e-commerce platform, Lootie provides a 100% guarantee for each of its products — you are sure to receive the correct product (and of course, a working one,) else you get a refund. This money-back guarantee is not something that is in place on every other platform — for example, Alibaba will often defect a dispute to an external arbitrer. With Lootie, you can be secure in the knowledge that your purchase will arrive at your doorstep safe and sound. For goods such as shoes and clothing, Lootie has partnered up with StockX, which provides in-house verification services. These are rigorous, ensuring that every streetwear merchandise item that comes to you from Lootie is genuine and in mint condition. Every Yeezy box or Hypebeast box you open will guarantee an authentic prize reaching your doorstep.

It’s truly a joy to watch Lootie set an example, since every time one player makes an improvement to their services, we see other players in the market try to adjust the same parameters as well in order to keep their service up to the mark. Lootie as a mystery box platform is fun, trusted, and amazingly enjoyable. We can’t wait to see what Lootie has next in store for the e-commerce industry. All we know is that they are paving the road forward, and it’s a road every competitor has their eye on. 

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Instagram: @LootieCom

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