What and how to buy on Taobao

In our previous article, we showed seven ridiculous products from the Chinese Internet auction TaoBao, only briefly mentioning what it is. The time has come to tell you more about TaoBao, compare it with Ebay and tell how you can buy cheap and comfortable on this product triumph of victorious socialism

Taobarish

TaoBao is a collection of Chinese online stores, this is a huge marketplace where hundreds of thousands of Chinese manufacturers and resellers sell their goods.

TaoBao is huge, like the dam of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Plant - behind the sign of an online store there is a giant company that can compete with any North American service in the revenue and the number of users.
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Today, the number of users of the online auction is approaching one hundred million (the population of Russia is just a few tens of millions more), and the turnover of the entire TaoBao service is rapidly approaching absolutely monstrous hundreds of billions of yuan (the service grows more than 1.5 times a year ).

But these are just numbers - it is difficult for them to describe the mysterious Chinese soul. Here is a tablet in which we compare TaoBao and Ibei.

	TaoBao	Ebay
1. Website design and language	The design is made in the Chinese style - a lot of things at once. The language is Chinese with rare patches of bad English. The site works fast enough.	In design - simplicity and the desire for universal convenience. English language. The site works very quickly, being the unwritten benchmark of high-load services.
2. Currency and payment system	Yuan TaoBao does not accept international systems - only bank cards of Chinese banks.	Dollars The only payment system PayPal.
3. Sellers	A typical seller on TaoBao is a merchant of goods of small firms (which employ five to seven people).	On Ebay, everyone sells - from ordinary Americans, who get rid of unnecessary used things to quite serious online stores.
4. Buyers	Ordinary Chinese wanting to save	People from all over the world, avid to high-quality and inexpensive things.
5. Products	Basically - clothes and very original electronics of local production	Everything from cars to hairpins. Basically electronics world brands.
6. Rating system	Rating is both sellers and buyers. The former are evaluated even by the conformity of the product’s photograph.	Multistage rating system.
7. Shipping	Most goods are shipped to China only.	Some of the goods are shipped all over the world, some - only in the USA and Canada.
8. The difficulty of self-use	It is extremely difficult to buy on your own - knowledge of Chinese, a credit card of a local bank and an understanding of the intricacies of Chinese trade are required.	Moderate - you need to know English at an average level and have PayPal.

The service interface can be easily estimated from this screenshot:



A riot of colors in its full splendor!

Russian-Chinese commodity friendship

What goods should we, Russians, look for in this commodity ocean?

First of all, we should be interested in electronics .

Chinese electronics is the quintessence of Chinese character. Our eastern friends love Juche ideas in their various manifestations very much - they prefer to rely on their own strength in everything.

No one will buy American iPhones in China - it’s expensive and alien (even though iPhones are made in China). The Chinese will better start making iPhone replicas that will support seven different SIM cards, show TV and so on.

On TaoBao you should go for unusual electronics - mobile phones, various gadgets. However, you need to be prepared for the harsh Chinese design.

The second main article of the Russian-Chinese friendship is clothing .

Eastern friends have long been sheathed us, learning to sew quality and inexpensive.
On TaoBao, you can easily find any clothes (which sometimes likes to hide under famous western brands).

Especially profitable to buy clothes in small batches - so it costs real pennies. And this is not stinky sneakers from the market, but quite comfortable and modern clothes.

Also, TaoBao will delight people who are looking for something special .

Sometimes any electronic component can not be found anywhere except in TaoBao. The same applies to the widest range of a variety of products. If you need something and this is nowhere to be found neither on us, nor on Ebay - look for it on TaoBao. There is probably no such thing either, but there are a hundred and fifty kinds of Chinese replicas (which are not always inferior in quality of the desired product).

I want everything myself

How to buy goods on TaoBao?

For an unprepared person, buying on Taobao is no easier than trading in the intergalactic market.

First of all, you need to understand that between you and the seller - an infinitely deep linguistic and cultural gulf. If Americans are more or less close and comprehensible to us, then the Russian person cannot understand the Chinese mind.

In order to search for products and communicate with the seller, you must learn a language or use a translator. One bad luck (or rather, two) - Chinese learns on average for three to five years, and the Google translator itself cannot translate even half of the text with a sufficient level of accuracy and clarity.

A few words about the rating of the seller.
Like on ebay, sellers on Tao Bao have their own rating.


Yellow arrow - this is the product of the photo, blue - the ratio of buyers to the seller, and the red - the speed of delivery of goods. How can the speed of delivery of goods affect the rating of the seller? And very easy!
Often the goods presented in the windows are not yet actually produced - the seller simply picks up orders for their production. So, let’s say, fifty people will “buy” a humanoid walking robot - and robots will be produced. Law bus in the vast country, in a word.

The second Chinese wall between you and TaoBao will be the question of a Chinese bank card. And here even Google translator will not help.

Generally speaking, Russians who have single-handedly mastered the mysterious world of Chinese e-commerce are few. It is much easier and easier to contact an intermediary.

EBayTaoBay

Most recently, we opened the eastern direction of our service and now we are happy to work as an intermediary between Russians and Chinese equipment dealers.

EbayToday has uniform rates for all directions of trade - whether you buy from Ebay or from TaoBao.
Moreover, we tried to make our tariffs as similar as possible - only currencies differ.
Forwarding and other goodies are also available for the Chinese market.
All this you can read here .

A Google translator is enough for you to search for a product - just use the page translation service as a whole. Well, to deal with the details will help our valiant support service.

All purchases on TaoBao are made in RMB. The currency in your account can be easily exchanged for yuan using our internal exchanger.



To buy goods on TaoBao, simply on the Buy page in the online store, go to the China tab:


In the Link to product field, simply enter a link to the page with the desired product.



The blue arrow shows the price of goods in RMB.

On the order page all the names and comments you can write in Russian.



In the comments to the order you can clarify its features, for example, write "I want the same, but blue" or "I want the same as in the photo." For TaoBao, the last item is quite significant, because in the seller’s rating, a separate place is occupied by the item “product matching photos”.

With EbayToday, buying goods from TaoBao is no more difficult than buying on Ebay - the principle is the same.

We hope that our article has brought the mysterious world of Chinese e-commerce a bit closer to you, and EbayToday is ready to make shopping in TaoBao simple and easy.

Thanks for attention.
As always, we are happy to answer your questions in the comments.