Any of these shipping from Taiwan with English websites?
I mean that everyone uses Shopee now. Its just a better service. Only old people are using Yahoo and PCHome. Shopee have decimated the service and are clearly number one. If I look in a convenience store, 70% is Shopee. I dont understand why foreigners are still laboring with horrible old services like Ruten and PCHome.
I use both Ruten and Shopee. Things can be found on one site that are not on the other.
The tax issue?
What about it. Shopee is a domestic site
Singapore, isn´t it?
Shopee is from Singapore.
Its a domestic entity though. Shopee Tw. Its registered in Taiwan. Its not like buying from Amazon or Ebay. You dont have to worry about taxes
What are these new fangled technologies you speak of ? 
Statistically, Shopee only has about a 10% advantage on Ruten in terms of visitors to the websites, though this seems to be on the increase. Mobile app traffic use isn’t reported, but Shopee has far more installs.
I use my phone for a lot, but I find it much better to shop through a full website so I can do real comparisons and research. It’s not easy to multitask or get a broad view of a product on mobile. Too easy for me to make mistakes like this:
Anyway, smart sellers sell on all platforms with significant traffic. Also, Taiwan has a lot of old people, by which I assume you mean over 40. For me, I buy a lot of second-hand or custom made parts, and Ruten seems to have more second hand products. I don’t know about the flexibility with custom made items on Shopee, but it’s fairly easy on Ruten. Also, Shopee is too red.
A service like OLX would be useful here. I used that a lot during my time in the Philippines. It has expanded, but not to Taiwan. If there’s anything similar I haven’t found it. Maybe FB groups serve the same purpose.
I found out something interesting. These days I was trying to buy some stuff and I found a seller who had it. I needed a pair of units, so I clicked on + and got two units of it. I clicked on buy now and… magically the shipping fee doubled. Weird. I talked to the seller and he said I had to change the fees, that he couldn’t. WTH. anyway, it turns out that before the check out you can modify the final price. Whatever you inpu has to be validated/accepted by the seller, but the option is there. Hope this helps someone.
It’s the seller’s mistake. They can set set a number of items to ship at the same price at the time of the listing. Some of them just don’t.
S[quote=“ShaoLeFen, post:70, topic:167012”]
Statistically, Shopee only has about a 10% advantage on Ruten in terms of visitors to the websites, though this seems to be on the increase. Mobile app traffic use isn’t reported, but Shopee has far more installs.
I use my phone for a lot, but I find it much better to shop through a full website so I can do real comparisons and research. It’s not easy to multitask or get a broad view of a product on mobile. Too easy for me to make mistakes like this:
[/quote]
Shopee is mobile-centric as are Taiwanese young people. Thats how they destroyed the market in a few years. I cant put myself through the UX brain disaster of Taiwanese-sites anymore and dont really know anyone under 40 still using them.
And all young people. Mobile shopping isn’t always smart shopping, it’s impulse-centric. I’ve never had a problem on Ruten. Search for stuff, find it, compare, buy. Never really hurt my brain. I’m sure mobile shopping great if I want to browse phone cases or backpacks or whatever young people buy, but my shopping is more complicated.
Sure but not focusing on UI/UX and mobile was how PCHome and Yahoo lost the Taiwan ecommerce market. There are consumers like you, which is why those sites still exist, but for me the user experience is too poor and the fact that they dont bother to try to improve it makes me want to spend my money elsewhere.
We old people don’t buy enough to keep them in business. We’ve already got enough. The way their stats are falling, Ruten is probably in crisis mode now figuring out how to get their audience back. I think PC Home is beyond recovery but they’re big enough that they’re going to slug along like a Yahoo dinosaur to the end.
Yahoo has that option too. It is very helpful with shipping multiple stuff.
Interesting. I asked a couple of people on their mid 20’s (24 and 27 i think) and they never used ruten.
What do they use, Shopee?
PC Home and Shopee.