HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT TAOBAO AGENT

There has an ecommerce platform in China, more than 50,000 pieces of merchandises are sold in every minute.Taobao agent It Called Taobao. Taobao changes the shopping habit of younger generation even brings a hit of ecommerce in China. With the reputation widely known abroad, many foreigners take eyes on it and want to learn how to shopping in taobao. If you insist to shop by youself you can visit my other post about How To Shop From China Platform

People in China love to shop in Taobao and recently many shoppers outside China also found shopping in Taobao is very interesting. But for most of them, they can’t directly buy from Taobao, because it require you to have a Chinese bank account for the payment and also most sellers in Taobao don’t know much English and are unwilling to ship their products oversea. At this moment Taobao Agents are providing services to foreigner outside China, assisting them to shop from Taobao.

The business model for Taobao Agents is like this. Foreign shoppers select products in Taobao then entrust Taobao Agents to shop for them. Taobao Agents will buy the items from Taobao to their own warehouse and then ship them out to foreign shoppers. They usually charge 10% of (item price + domestic shipping fee) as their service fee.

If you search the key word Taotao Agent in Google, tons of websites are provide this kind of service. As how to select a good agent, I think most people are very confused. If you’re one of them and you’re really interested in buying from Taobao, I strongly suggest you do some research on what’s Taobao or you’ll be easily fooled by some Taobao Agents. I sorted out some standards to judge whether a Taobao Agent is reliable.

Product Price Between Taobao and Agent’s Website

Taobao open API to all of its products data, including price, size, stock amount, color and etc. Since Taobao doesn’t have a English version, most agents collect this API data and use Google translation to translate them into English. Agents are charging you service fee basing original the price in Taobao, they should showing the proper USD price to you. If they increase the price without reasonable reason, think twice before using their service.

For some situation, price not matching with Taobao is acceptable. Such as items in Taobao are on sales, therefore the prices on Taobao are much cheaper than before. This often happens in Taobao and a good Taobao should explain this to their clients allow them to modify the price according to the discounted price. But as I observed many agents don’t mention this and charge their client for the price before discount while shop the item at discount price.

International Shipping Fee

International shipping fee is very expensive and you should check your shipping fee before purchase everything in Taobao. The most prevalent shipping method for Agents is EMS, because it can ship items that are not allowed by others and cover wide range of area. The followings are DHL, Fedex, UPS and TNT. For small parcel no heavier than 1kg, they usually use China Post Air Mail.

Very important: It’s way too expensive to use these international express delivery without discount! In fact Agents in China can get discount from logistic companies and the usually it’s 40% off, which is the standard within in this industry. You can totally disregard those who don’t offer you any discount. (P.S. China post Air Mail doesn’t offer discount, it’s very cheap but takes very long time compared to others.)

Make sure you can find their international shipping fee information in their website. Those who hide this shipping fee or unwilling to make it clear to clients are not considered to be honest. A good Agent should tell their clients how much it cost in shipping before they make a decision in purchasing.


Service Fee and Minimum Charge

I don’t who make this fixed but service fee for Agent are set to be 10% of (product price + domestic shipping fee). It sounds reasonable considering all the service agents provide to you. Some agents will charge will 5% of (product price + domestic shipping fee + international shipping fee). In most cases, international shipping fee is not less than product price, so personally I prefer this first one.

Minimum charge in service fee is around 5 to 8USD, that’s to say if you purchase less than 50USD, you still have to pay them 5USD service fee. This police encourage people to shop multiple items and in most cases people will do so. Because price in Taobao are very low and buying big quantity will lower the average shipping cost for each items. But if Agents require more than 8USD, you’d better give yourself a convincing reason to use their service.English Taobao