People are turning to Gumtree to satisfy their desire for Stikeez

However you might feel about Stikeez, the collectible toys Pick n Pay currently gives out with purchases over R150, there’s no getting around their popularity. It should hardly be surprising then that people are going online to get their hands on the brightly coloured blobs of plastic without having find more groceries to spend their money on.

On eBay for instance, you can pick up a collection of Stikeez for anywhere from R59 to R119. And on online classifieds site Gumtree, individual Stikeez are going for as much as R10.

Sure your collection isn’t likely to bring in a fortune, but if you’re not a Stikeez fan you’re at least getting something out of a product you didn’t want in the first place.

“The average seems to be about R10 per Stickee [sic], while completed collections are going for about R200. Many more users actually prefer to swop rather than sell,” says Gumtree marketing head Claire Cobbledick.

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Sellers aren’t battling to find willing buyers either, it seems. “Yesterday we saw about 20 new ads go up for Stikeez,” says Cobbledick, “and most of them took down their ads on the same day because the items had sold or swopped.”

Cobbledick says she wasn’t surprised to see a sudden surge in Stikeez sales on the online classifieds platform.

“As a parent, I know firsthand that children are begging to go to Pick’n Pay just to complete their collections before the promotion ends,” she says. “Classifieds is a great way to quickly get your hands on that missing Stickee, without spending the R150 and ending up with duplicates.”

The relative abundance of Stikeez means that they’re unlikely to ever sell for the crazy amounts rare collectibles do, but it’s an interesting side-effect of what must have been a relatively inexpensive marketing ploy by Pick n Pay.