Does Your K-pop Album Purchase Count on the Hanteo Chart? The Store Matters, Not Your Country

International fans keep asking whether ordering an album from outside Korea keeps it off the Hanteo Chart. The country you order from is not what decides it. Two things are: whether the store reports to Hanteo, and whether the sale lands inside the counting window.

The store has to be a Hanteo Family store

Hanteo counts sales reported by affiliated retailers it calls Hanteo Family. Buy from a shop outside that network and the sale does not exist as far as the chart is concerned, no matter where you live or what you paid.

You do not have to guess which shops those are. Hanteo publishes a searchable list, in English, and it is the only answer worth trusting:

Stores we found listed there include Weverse Shop, KTOWN4U, YesAsia, MUSIC PLAZA, Aladin, YES24, LIGHTUPK and COKODIVE. We did not find Amazon or Sokollab. Kpop Town states on its own site that it is affiliated, but we could not confirm it on Hanteo's list — check the list yourself before ordering if the chart matters to you.

Hanteo's own February 2025 notice puts the network at roughly 1,500 sales channels worldwide. A figure of 5,000-plus circulates online, but it traces back to community-edited wikis rather than to Hanteo, so treat it as unverified.

Timing: the sale counts when the store reports it, not when you pay

This is where most pre-orders get lost. KTOWN4U's notice is explicit that its site shows every paid order the moment payment clears, while Hanteo only counts what has actually shipped. Kpoptown and LIGHTUPK both describe the same rule — counted at shipping, not at checkout.

It is not perfectly uniform, though. At least one affiliated store, Music Plant, states it counts on payment completion instead. The safe way to think about it: the sale registers when your store transmits it, which is usually dispatch, and the exact moment is the store's to define.

First-week sales — chodong — run seven days from the release date, the release date included. An order that ships after that window still counts toward the overall chart. It just does not count toward the number fans are usually watching.

What your country does and does not affect

It does not decide whether the album counts. It does decide which chart it lands on: Hanteo sorts sales into national and global sub-charts by shipping destination. So a purchase from abroad counts — it just may not count where you expected to see it.

Not relevant at all: your billing address, and the currency you paid in.

The QR card in the album is a separate system

Many albums ship with a QR-coded authentication card. It does not decide whether your purchase counts. Hanteo says so directly in its own help centre: an album bought from a Hanteo Family store is counted whether or not you manage to authenticate it. Authentication feeds a different set of rankings — the Global Authentication Chart and the Star Chart — not the sales chart.

Hanteo Chart and Circle Chart are not the same thing

A second source of confusion. Hanteo is privately run and updates in real time, built on point-of-sale data from its retail network. Circle Chart — renamed from Gaon in July 2022 — is run by the Korea Music Content Association with Ministry of Culture backing, and is built on shipment figures from distributors. It publishes weekly, monthly and annual charts.

Different inputs, different networks. A strong first week on one does not guarantee the same on the other.

What we could not confirm

  • Whether Amazon, Sokollab or Kpop Town are currently Hanteo Family stores
  • The exact daily cutoff time Hanteo uses to close a counting day
  • Whether the counting formula itself changed in 2025 or 2026 — the last structural change we could date is the Hanteo Chart 4.0 album index in July 2022

Sources

Verified 10 August 2026.

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