My experience buying a knife using Opfocus

Discuss Spyderco's products and history.
metaphoricalsimile
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Posts: 554
Joined: Sun Jun 28, 2020 7:56 pm

My experience buying a knife using Opfocus

#1

Post by metaphoricalsimile »

I wanted to write about this for people who are curious whether or not signing up for the program is "worth it." For those who don't know, Opfocus is a program that provides a 50% discount off MSRP for qualified people which includes military, veterans, first responders and medical personnel. This discount can be used to purchase up to 10 items from the Spyderco online store per year, and I think there are maybe restrictions around sprint runs (but I'm not sure). The TL;DR is: yes, it provides about a 20% discount over buying the knife from an online retailer that offers free shipping.

I was mildly surprised that I needed to make an account for the Spyderco online store separate from my forum account, but it wasn't a hassle. As a vet, verifying my account was very easy and did not require having access to paper work, merely a working memory. I don't know what the verification process is like for other qualified users.

Actually purchasing the knife through the store was a mild hassle because a lot of models that are in stock at retailers are not in stock on the Spyderco site, and there is no "in stock" option to filter the options down to those that were actually available. I had to sort through a lot of out of stock options before finding something I wanted to buy. I ended up choosing a Salt 2 in SE LC200n, because I wanted to see if I'd have a better experience with SE in a non-H1 steel than I have with H1. Checkout was easy and my discount was automatically applied. MSRP is significantly higher than street price, and I had to pay about $13 for shipping, so my final out-the-door price was close to $100, whereas the knife is ~$120 from other online retailers, so it did end up being a significant discount.

The knife shipped nearly immediately and ended up at my doorstep pretty quick, I would say the total shipping and delivery time was on par with non-Amazon online retailers.

Overall I think the program works pretty well and offers a significant discount, but I wish it were easier to filter for knives that are actually in stock on the website.