Taobao Madness 1

Stanley's

Well.. was asked to introduce more on how to go about shopping for Taobao by Suvie.. haha.. It will be a long post by me i think.. Will try to explain as much as i can from the humble experience i gather from buying from Taobao.

I was introduced to Taobao shopping by my fellow colleagues.. First it started off as buying some media box (Ask me personally.. hahaha) from Aliexpress (which is also a China shopping platform but it is in English and amount is in USD).. shopping from Aliexpress is easy.. You just need to 1) register an account, 2) find the items you wan, 3) add to cart, 4) check out, 5) pay by credit card and Viola.. 6) wait for the things to arrive.. its quite a no brainer thing.. but bear in mind the things are generally more expensive than Taobao but u need not worry abt language barrier and shipping.

As most of my colleagues in my department are at the stage of getting their new house ready, I was lucky to chance upon the opportunity of buying stuffs from Taobao. Actually buying from Taobao is easy though.. you need to know abit of basic chinese.. (Good for reading reviews, reading specs & details and also search for items.)

Let me start off from choosing the things you want from taobao.
1) go to taobao.com and register for an account. (Actually an account is not necessary if you are buying stuffs through agents in Singapore.. you will need it more for China forwarder like 4PX or Hongxun. But its good to have as you need an account for Aliwangwang, a messenger-like program for communicating with the seller. The account is also good for tracking the items you have see before..)
2) Search for the items you want. If you do not know the chinese words for the items you want. Google it.. I usually type "Blah blah blah in chinese translation." Then, copy and paste in the Taobao search engine. Sometimes you need to search for more than a word to find exactly what you need.
3) If you are successful with the translation, you will be shown with all the items with the description, i will then sort them (the red box). Usually i will sort by 销量 (the amount of sales), you can also sort by 综合(overall)，人气(popularity)，信用(creditability)，最新(newest/latest  items)，价格(price)

4) Click on the items you want and you will enter the shop page.
5) Once entered, you will be able to see the item's price, description, specs, review, domestic shipping fee if any. You can also see the rating for the shop (red box). There is Heart Shape, Diamond and Crown (Highest is crown) and more the merrier. But sometimes as the shop could be new, low rating does not means not good.. Thats why you will have to read the 评价(review).

Take note that some of the shops host their website in Tmall.com, hence you will not find the above rating, instead (look at the 2nd photo below), you will find their rating as compared to competitors.

6) Once you find the stuffs that you want, take note on the colour, size, or specs that you want, and click on it to find out the exact price. The blue box indicate the price, the green box indicates the domestic shipping price within China (I will touch on it late on how to find out where to send, which will change depends on which agents or forwarder you use). The purple box indicate the various variety of the items, you must click on it to know the price.

Next, depends on individual preference, I will take down the URL (which is needed if you use an agent), and the items name, colour blah blah blah in an excel file for futher tracking.

7) Some times, if you need to know stuffs like the packaging dimension, ask for discount or free gift. You must chat with the seller via Aliwangwang. Click on the cute blue speech bubble, to start the chat. But dont do it before you install the Aliwangwang program which you can find on the main page (2nd photo, green box)

8) After choosing the items you want, its time to ship those items to Singapore!! Which i will do it on a separate post as this post is getting too long.. Hahaha.. I usually use 65daigou or Peeka which are the bigger and more reputable Taobao agent in Singapore. I have yet to try forwarder like 4PX or Hongxun but i do know roughly how they operate. I will touch on the Pros and Cons also on my next post which will help you decide who to choose. But generally is that, if you prefer more convenient but slightly more expensive service, choose agents.. If you prefer more coordinate work but cheaper alternative, choose forwarder. Forwarder requires you to converse in Chinese, whereas agent you can use English.

You can check out the Agent website. If you like what i post and decided to use agent, do help to register an account under my referrals so i can earn rewards point!! hahaha..
65daigou: http://www.65daigou.com/Join/sim_stanley86@hotmail.com.html
Peeka: http://buy4u.peeka.sg/signup/b28a3a96272bec5988ada5ed1587ac20

Stay Tune on my next post!

Suvie's

Was introduced to Taobao.com by Stanley, he kinda chance upon it and was researching about it for quite a while before he ask if i would like to try taobao-ing. At first like many we were skeptical; all the stereotypes, from china related products. However, in the end i pass a comment which begins our taobao madness; many product we have in Singapore now are from China, there is always made in China, and even Singaporeans now are from China. I know it is not very nice, but i think there is some truth in it. But yeah, this is how our taobao journey begins, we have nothing against China just that we need to convince ourselves to take that leap of faith to buy from taobao; which we glad we did.

So here it is I am gonna share a bit about our first Taobao shopping, not a Taobao expert here, as it is all in chinese and my chinese CMI, but Stanley is really good with his Chinese and he had done quite a lot of research on it. So he will share more later (below).

So firstly, the above is the Taobao Site and how it looks like when u enter. There you can search all things in Chinese. Our very first buy was way back when we brought 2 jackets which ends up with really good material and all. Then the madness begins when we start thinking of getting things for our house from Taobao; which we did. This episode will be first of the many buys that is to come. And on this batch of buys, we got the following items; 

1) Kitchen Sink 

2) Dining Light 

3) Bridal Shoes

4) More shoes and more more shoes!! 

So here they are... 

Our loots! First batch! 

My bridal shoes for my taiwan photoshoot! 

Shoes for one of my friend. 

Another of my bridal shoe for photoshoot.

A pair of casual shoes for me to wear to school! 

My fav shoe in all the batch! Impressive huh!

A bridal shoe for a friend! 

Our Dining Light! 

Testing the effects out! 

How it will look like when you set it up! 

Which we have not. Will take pictures of it once our house is ready! 

The Kitchen Sink! Super Solid! 

This Mixer Tap kills! Super hardy. 

How the whole sink looks like with all the and all the racks are included! 

Again will take picture when it is set up! 

Total, we spend like $280 for the whole sink which include the mixer tap, the rack and all the other stuff u need to fix up the sink. $80 for the Dining Light. And about $25 for each pair of shoes! Happy with all our buys! And will be getting more stuff in; our next batch will be in like May! 

And Stanley will share more about all this when he "hijacks" this post! =)