Ordering My Golden Child Golden Air Badge on Everline vs. Kpoptown

Woollim's collaboration with Everline looks like it won't be stopping anytime soon, especially with the announcement of Golden Child's Golden Air Badge on pre-order here from October 16th, 2020 at 1PM KST to October 20th, 2020 at 11:59PM KST. Shipping starts on the 26th. Woollim has never dropped any surprise merch like this; usually Golden Child branded goods like patches, pins, wappens, are released through concerts and official Goldenness fankits.

I'm a sucker for Golden Child branded goods, so of course I instantly wanted this. This airline badge comes with a group photocard (the same image as the album poster from the airline shoot) and paper packaging with the old Golden Child logo on the front. The product price is $16.27 USD, but with the ridiculous total weight of 3kg (product weight and box weight are supposedly 1.5kg each), shipping to the US became $60.80 for a grand total of $77.08.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. I was not going to spend $77.08 on a tiny piece of metal (I know my limits). Kpoptown put up the item listing on October 18th here, set at $21.90 USD and shipping can either be K-packet ($12.90) or DHL ($19.00) to the US. Kpoptown also opened up pre-orders for Lovelyz' Deep Forest concert goods, whereas Ktown4u only sold Golden Child's NOW concert merch. I'm not sure why Ktown4u stopped selling Woollim's Everline goods and now Kpoptown is. Anyways, I had to choose where to order, decide which site was the lesser of two evils. Everline is notoriously known for ripping off customers on international shipping (you can read my experience with them for Future and Past concert goods here and NOW concert goods here), and Kpoptown shorted my Re-boot order and never refunded me or shipped out the rest of my order (my experience here).

I ordered the badge from Kpoptown on October 19th, along with the last Infinite 2018 Season's Greetings that they had in stock, at 50% off. The only option to ship both items together was DHL for $33.00. Shortly after my purchase, there were 105 badges left in stock. I checked again in the afternoon of the 20th, and there were only 5 badges left in stock.

Honestly I'm still skeptical. I checked other preorders on Kpoptown such as Men's Health with Jangjun on the cover, Lovelyz ontact concert goods, CIX, and Super M, and all had 100 items in stock. It just seemed weird to me that so many items were stagnant at 100. And even stranger, they have 993 copies of Nam Woohyun's limited version of A New Journey when it's sold out everywhere else.

Kpoptown sent me an email notification that my package was shipped on October 29th, and my package arrived on November 2nd!

To my pleasant surprise, I did receive both the Golden Air badge and Infinite's 2018 Season's Greetings, and both were well packaged. A thin layer of bubblewrap lined the season's greetings while large air packets filled the rest of the space. I'm really relieved that I have this beautiful badge on hand but as for trusting Kpoptown...they still have a long way to go before I can ever fully trust them again.

When I originally posted this, I had said that both items arrived in good condition. But now that I'm actually looking at the season's greetings, unfortunately one of the edges arrived ripped. But I'll let it go, especially since I got this for 50% off.

I'll have unboxing posts for both items coming up!