qSave Your Wallet by Ordering from China
By: Sequoia Edwards
Tags: China, Shopping, Lifehacks, Saving Money, Taobao

When you buy an item from the average store it’s usually actually being sold to you for 2 to 4 times the price you “could” have gotten it for, had you lived in China. Taobao, Alibaba, and Aliexpress are three Chinese sites where you can get many products more or less directly from the factories that made them, and thus a lot cheaper.

Examples of cost savings (for where I live in Sweden, not necessarily for your country):

GBC screen protector: $0.16 USD directly from a Chinese seller (before shipping and import costs), versus $2 at an online store in Sweden (before shipping).

USD directly from a Chinese seller (before shipping and import costs), versus at an online store in Sweden (before shipping). Silicone cutting board: $4 China. $10 Sweden.

China. Sweden. 128g micro SD card: $5 China. $26 Sweden.

China. Sweden. Wireless PS2 controller: $2 China. $20 used, $40 new in Sweden!

Due to price differences like this, on my first haul from Taobao to Sweden, the cost before shipping was literally 1/4th of the cost it would have been before shipping had I used normal online sites for buying the same things within Europe. Shipping and import tax/fees is a problem I’ll get to further on in this post. And these costs are for a private person buying individual items for their own use, so you can imagine the kinds of savings a company buying in bulk might have.

Differences between the three sites:

Alibaba : Made for ordering in bulk directly from factories, and the price listed is per piece/item. Usually there’s a minimum order amount that’s between 20–100 items and you have to discuss your purchase and create a “sales contract” or get a “price quote” before you buy. Sometimes you can order a single item as a “sample”. You can often negociate about colours, etc. even if they don’t have exactly what you want listed. You can also buy services here, such as freight forwarding, and not just physical items. The site’s in English.

: Made for ordering in bulk directly from factories, and the price listed is per piece/item. Usually there’s a minimum order amount that’s between 20–100 items and you have to discuss your purchase and create a “sales contract” or get a “price quote” before you buy. Sometimes you can order a single item as a “sample”. You can often negociate about colours, etc. even if they don’t have exactly what you want listed. You can also buy services here, such as freight forwarding, and not just physical items. The site’s in English. Aliexpress : The same items from Alibaba except (often) sold by third parties who have ordered the original bulk amount and are now selling the items individually. If you need a different colour etc these guys will contact the original factory and get it made for you. Site’s in English.

: The same items from Alibaba except (often) sold by third parties who have ordered the original bulk amount and are now selling the items individually. If you need a different colour etc these guys will contact the original factory and get it made for you. Site’s in English. Taobao: Basically Chinese Amazon, with shopfronts like Ebay or Etsy, that are middlemen connected to the original factories and farms similar to Aliexpress. Taobao is for new (not secondhand) items. This is where companies generally take professional-looking photos and videos of their products and try to actually sell them to customers. The whole experience is a lot more polished and like a normal online store compared to Aliexpress and Alibaba, but the prices might also be higher.

It’s worth noting that depending on what you want it’s actually easier to buy it as a part within another item (or as one item within a kit), then dissassembling the item to get at what you need once it arrives at your house, rather than finding a place that sells what you want alone.

How to order from Taobao if it’s in Chinese?

There’s two main ways to order from Taobao and similar sites. The first is to use a middleman service in English that offers you a free warehouse, various packing or unpacking options, photo-taking services etc. If you need anything like a special colour or adjustments, they’ll negociate with the seller for you in Chinese. Depending on which middleman site you choose they’ll also advise you on which shipping options you have available according to what you’re buying — if you’re buying food for example, you can’t always use all shipping options because the food will get confiscated, and some companies won’t warn you about this beforehand whereas others will. I personally use We Go Buy (affiliate link — if you use it to sign up, you’ll really help me out a lot and it won’t cost you anything!) but their search function is really awful, so I search in English at Buy 2 You (don’t purchase with them — their fees are higher and they don’t let you ship as many different types of items).

When I find the kind of item I want, I go to the original page in Chinese and copy-paste the item title into Taobao’s search function to see if I can get the same thing cheaper or with a better design from another seller. If copy-pasting doesn’t return any other results, or only really few results, the title’s probably too specific and you need to delete some of the letters in it. You can at times also search in English on Taobao and it’ll get results (for example, vaporwave works in English, although there’s also a Chinese term for it which is 蒸汽波).

Two of the pros I really like with We Go Buy, just for your information:

They always take a free photo of the item after it arrives at the warehouse. This is how you’ll find out (before it actually reaches your house) if you have any missing items or unexpectedly got double of an item etc.

Free cancellation of orders (Buy 2 You charges a handling fee even if you have to cancel).

The second way to order is to order directly from Taobao, using their Chinese interface or Google Translate (as far as I could tell there isn’t an English interface). This skips the middleman fees, but then again, if you don’t speak Chinese you won’t be able to respond to seller’s messages and so on. When I lived in Taiwan (without being able to really speak any Chinese) I did order stuff directly from Taobao since the shipping was super fast and cheap, but then I’d get messages in Chinese from the sellers saying stuff like “this size is really small, are you sure you want this size?” or “this is out of stock, what will you do?” or “please review right away” and of course I couldn’t answer.

Pros of using a middleman service versus getting direct shipments from Taobao:

A good middleman service will do a quality check so you can get a replacement/your money back within the seller’s time window for returns. Here’s an example of We Go Buy’s free, automatic quality check:

“Greetings, this is a friendly reminder. We found that your product was defective ( stains) during the quality inspection. If you can still accept this product, please click [Accept] and submit the parcel normally. If you are not satisfied with the product, please contact the shopping agent so the shopping agent will negociate with the seller for you. We will try our best to protect your after-sales rights. Please confirm as soon as possible. If you do not confirm within 72 hours, you might not be able to return/exchange the product. Thank you!”

Normally your items can sit in the middleman’s warehouse for free for 2–6 months before you start getting any fees for keeping them there. This means if you used up all your money to buy the items in the first place, you can wait to pay for shipping until after you get your next month’s paycheck.

If you live in the EU or any other place that will charge you insane import and handling fees per package from Asian or non-EU countries, a middleman service can put everything into one box for you so the fees are less. Freight forwarding companies usually don’t do this for you (they might if you ask, but that’s not their job).

As I write this, Sweden currently charges around 8 USD minimum for every single package coming from outside Europe, regardless of if the package contents are only worth 1 dollar or not, plus 25% tax of what the item actually costed according to the receipt in the box (or the custom’s office’s GUESS at what the item cost, if there’s no receipt). That’s what the post office claims. However in reality I once ordered something for $300 from the USA and I had to pay $100 in fees and taxes when I collected it at the post office in Sweden! So I don’t trust their tax/fee estimates one bit, and I assume it will be up to 30% of the item’s stated cost.

Shipping’s too expensive!

When you use a middleman you can choose what kind of shipping to get from them and you’re normally also hindered in what exactly you can order (for example, no powders, meaning foods like “kinako” or types of makeup). But there’s another option, which is to use a freight forwarder or “dropshipper”. While these are often used by companies buying tons of stuff at once, you can actually start using them from weights as low as 1kg packages. The recommendation is to:

Wait until all your items come to the middleman’s warehouse. Get them to remove all the extra packaging and pay a little (around $3) to do a “rehearsal weighing” so that you know closer to the exact weight of all your items. Often items come in unnecessary boxes, for example shoes don’t need a shoebox, so tell them to remove those. Go to Alibaba and search for “freight forwarder”, “dropshipper” or “logistics service” plus your country name and pick a company that has at least 5 years’ worth of experience. You can find companies that will ship for $1 per kg or even less. They’ll also be able to ship what they call “sensitive” items, which means stuff like powder, liquids and flammable items, for example resin for arts and crafts. Ask them for a shipping quote for the weight (and if possible, size) of what you were told your rehearsal weighing was. Ship from the middleman service’s warehouse (in China) to the freight forwarder’s warehouse (in China).

If you have a friend in Asia and are just ordering personal items anyway, it may be cheaper to mail the package to them, then get them to mail it to you but mark the package as a gift instead of as merchandise. Supposedly you don’t have to pay import fees or taxes on gifts.

Note that as I write this (early May 2020) the corona crisis is going on, which has doubled or in some cases tripled the cost of shipping items if you use a normal post office service. In the past few weeks many people’s packages from Asia to Europe and North America have been returned to the sender as well, for no reason other than the post offices being understaffed due to the virus. When a package comes back the sender should be able to get their money back for the shipping costs if they just fill out a form, and attempting to send it a second time might make it go through with no issues. However if you want to save money, either let the items sit in the middleman’s warehouse until shipping rates go down to normal or try a freight forwarder.

What to watch out for when ordering goods from China?

You can’t trust the colours are the correct shade as the photos at all, and sometimes the amount of items you’re getting with the purchase will be unclear. If there’s a text description of the colour, trust that instead, but usually it’ll be unclear. Here’s an example, this was the seller’s photo for a “transparent blue” PS2 controller:

And this was the same thing according to the free inspection photo I got once it arrived at the We Go Buy warehouse. Everything in the seller’s description and photos pointed to that I was getting only one light-blue controller, but I actually got two dark-blue controllers. The description itself never specified whether the colour would be light or dark blue, it simply said “blue”, so you can’t complain that it’s the wrong colour!: