Thank you for the confirmation.
I have had packages exceeding the amount come through. But I forgot the exact number.
There’s a chance it doesn’t get assessed a tax if you have it shipped by postal service. It bypasses ez way.
But are the Aliexpress prices for real? 6k vs 12k on shopee is a HUGE difference. Are people really paying double the price just to get it a few weeks quicker?
For the same exact item, model, and make?
A vast majority of sellers on platforms in Taiwan, no matter if shopee, ruten, or yahoo auctions, are all basically people who use some kind of script or something to populate the entire site with exact copies of listings from Taobao. You can tell if you look at all the items they sell and they have often 100,000 or more items (there is no way you can do this even with an army of workers). The price is often 200-300% markup from the price of Taobao, and no, you’re not getting it any faster. It’s basically a middleman that’s making money from you.
Another way to tell is look at the items they sell. If they have more than 1000 listings and none of them have anything to do with each other (like a seller selling laptops, yet when you look at all their items they are also selling car accessories, pet accessories, home accessories, and basically 9 out of 10 items they sell have nothing to do with what you are buying), or like 300k listings all uncategorized, then they are not a real seller.
Another giveaway is all their listing pictures are written in simplified characters.
This listing here is one example. Check their other items and you will realize they sell anything and everything. You’re going to be waiting 2 weeks for it, and paying a premium for it.
TaoBao is horrible to register. It gives me puzzles in chinese. I finally pass the puzzle. It gives me a username. And then when I try to search for something it asks me to sign in again. Which I can’t. Because even though it gave me a username. It never gave me a password.
I can honestly say this is the most difficult website I’ve ever seen. Ever.
Just tried to register a new account. “Limit for phone codes reached. Try again in 24 hours.”
Horrible.
You can’t even LOOK at what is on the website without doing the near impossible registration. Horrible.
Tried to register. Could logon with phone # and the code it sent me. I am also not clear how to register for a password.
I don’t know what to say, yea it’s horrible especially if you try to do this from outside of China. I think WeChat gives me the same problem, as in it makes friends send me codes in order to reactivate if a lockout is triggered. Must be Chinese law or something.
Just order from aliexpress and have them send it to a shipper in China and have them deal with shipping to Taiwan.
Remember most of us are foreigners. Maybe you should start a business offering to let us buy things from Taobao through you TL.
I did try to advertise this once, no one really needed my help in this, so I assume most have it taken care of.
And most foreigners have a Taiwanese wife or girlfriend who can help anyways.
What’s perplexing is why anyone would have listings in Taiwanese platform of ordering stuff from Taobao for people in Taiwan, considering that they can all just do it themselves. Such a business might be more useful in the states or Japan.
But you are open to it right? How do you charge for that?
I’m open to it but I’m charging 20% for dealing with all the risks and headache of doing this. Min. fee of 500nt. If you’re just going to order something small use one of those ruten sellers.
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This sounds like a great business opportunity! I’m sure a lot of people here would gladly pay an extra $500/20% for the convenience.
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I did put up a post on forumosified about this but that didn’t really get me any leads, and remember not all foreigners post here, in fact based on the number of foreigners I’m seeing (as in more and more) I’d say most foreigners do not post here. I’m excluding SEA workers in that estimate.
But apart from a few obviously scammy inquiries, I didn’t really get any serious replies, so I quietly dropped the matter.
Just the older ones. Most young people don’t know what a forum is.
I cannot guarantee I will take you up on your offer but I am going to keep my eyes peeled for things on Taobao or Aliexpress from now on. You said between these two you recommend Taobao?
Your pricing is not unreasonable. I think it is based on you assuming a lot of risk. What if somebody were to pre-pay (the full amount + your rate) would you agree to take a lower commission (say 10%, still minimum 500NT) ?
I require people to prepay, otherwise the risk is unacceptable.
The risk is item being held up in customs, dealing with warranty issues, delivery issues, having to somehow get the item to the customer (means me taking trips on the MRT to meet him or staying home, disruptions to my schedules, etc.) as well as unexpected cost (such as customs charge, exchange rate fluctuations, etc.).
So no, I won’t lower the rate, unless it’s for a more expensive item but even then I’ll need to evaluate it on a case by case basis because expensive item carries with it greater risks (higher loss from exchange rates, higher risks if item gets held by customs, etc.)
Hm I see I see… still in some cases it might work out as being cheaper. Unfortunately it looks like I cannot browse Taobao without an account anyway. I also failed to create or register the account, like another poster.
It’s why when I reference taobao links I just copy the screen shot because I realized they won’t even let you browse without an account.
I can help if you need help registering… I never ran into trouble but no idea what’s up. What error messages did you get, and did you try again in a day or two?
I could “successfully” logon using cell-phone and received code, but then when I click any shopping items it goes to a log-on page again where you can log on with username / password or with your cell-phone number. Then at that page I tried a couple times with cell-phone (since I do not have a password), but I did not receive SMS and at one point it said wait 24h.
