A POB (Pre-Order Benefit) is an extra item a shop gives you for pre-ordering an album, most often a photocard. Retailers commission their own rather than sharing one set, so which card you receive depends on where you bought the album.
What POB stands for
POB means Pre-Order Benefit: an extra item a shop gives you for pre-ordering an album. Most are photocards, but posters, postcards and lucky-draw entries are common too.
Why every retailer gives something different
This is the part that surprises people. A POB is not produced by the label and shared out. Each retailer commissions its own to compete for pre-orders. Buy the same album from Aladin and you get the Aladin card; buy it from Makestar and you get the Makestar card.
For a collector that means the set multiplies by the number of retailers. An eight-member group with five participating shops is already at least 40 cards.
What “unreleased” means here
“Unreleased photocard” appears constantly in benefit listings. It means a photo that is not in the album itself and can only be obtained through that benefit. Holding it back before release is the marketing point, which is where the name comes from.
The “N types, M at random” structure
Benefit listings are usually written like this:
Pre-order benefit: 2 random from 24 unreleased photocards
There are 24 different cards, and each buyer receives 2 of them at random. You cannot pick a member, so completing a set means buying multiple copies or trading on the secondhand market.
Nobody publishes what those 24 cards are
This is the part most people miss. Retailers do not release the list. Not at pre-order, not after release, not years later. A shop that intended to publish it would have done so when it was still selling pre-orders.
So the information exists only scattered across fans’ hands after the cards ship — in secondhand listing titles, unboxing posts, and spreadsheets someone kept. PokaFind collects those scattered records and rebuilds the list, and shows which entries are still unconfirmed rather than quietly leaving them out.
Where to check
To see which retailer offered which benefit for an album, start from the the set boards. To see one member’s cards together, pick them from an artist page.
